HP and Dell are selling ARM servers now. They’re primarily aimed at the high-volume Datacenter market, so they’re very dense, aimed to be save on space, cooling and electricity. It will be interesting to see how the vendors deliver ‘development’ systems to general developers and the Open Source community – this is certainly something that Ubuntu care about. I think you’ll probably see more general availability of systems next year.

Steve

I was just enquiring about the sort of costs you are looking at with ARM? And how fast is each iteration being developed?

Thank, Paul @ ConNetU

A spare battery is an option, or do some of your lightweight browsing and editing on a small notepad. (Evernote and Google drive are useful). Notepads (in general) have a longer battery life than laptops.

Sorry for the late reply, I didn’t see this comment when you made it.

You’re making a good point that ultimately in an Open Source context there are limits to a purely “no-cost” development model. Back in the 90′s the speed of development in Linux increased when full-time engineers could be dedicated to it through the sponsoring hardware companies.

Canonical sponsors Ubuntu which is provided free so this impacts how many engineers can be dedicated. However, it’s worth remembering there are lots of positives to this type of development model because other companies and users can ‘co-develop’. In the case of Ubuntu this means that lots of software comes in which isn’t created or contributed by Canonical.

I think the deeper issues is one of popularity. Apple makes a certain amount of money from each user which it then uses a portion of to fund development. If Ubuntu was as popular as Apple then for every X number of users there would be Y number of Open Source contributors. This would make the engine of Open Source development that much bigger.

It’s probably true that as Ubuntu crosses-over to being more mainstream the proportion of users who would also co-develop (become contributors) would drop. Most people just want to use a technology, not co-create it. However, I think the general argument still holds: more users = more developers. Finally, as you pointed out, the other option is for users to ‘contribute’ through the traditional relationship of buying things which enables developers to be hired etc.

Thanks for the comment!

Steve

I’m sorry you’ve had problems with Ubuntu One contacts. The best approach is to have a look at the help section.

The rest of your question is more general and given that you’re familiar with Debian I’m going to answer this from an Open Source perspective. Explicitly, you are using an Open Source (FOSS) piece of software so as with all OSS you are part of the means of production. The relationship you have with OSS is different from the relationship you have with proprietary software that you paid for. As the adage says in OSS users have a choice, “Money for time, or time for money”. So when you have problems one set of options is to trade your “time”: getting involved in solving the problem though the Ubuntu Forums, AskUbuntu, Launchpad or perhaps even creating the code and contributing it to the project. The alternative is to trade “money”: that means paying for products such as support, or sponsoring development. Free software doesn’t alter the fundamental dynamic that someone has to spend their effort resolving a bug – so ultimately there are no free lunches.

Finally, I won’t get into this indepth here, but there are trade-offs to be made between stability and having the latest software – Debian is at the one end of favouring stability when compared to Ubuntu, you could also consider Ubuntu LTS releases which are every two years as somewhere in the middle.

Best of luck!

Steve

How can they deploy something like this, completely non-working, the web is full of people having problems, there are lots of confirmed bugs about this, and then do not care at all (apparently) to solve the issues?

I guess I will move to debian-stable soon, because I don’t want zillions of new features which don’t work and let me loose endless hours trying to resolve the problems, but I do need some essential features like a working address-book (btw.: there is a CLI-tool to export the addresses, why is it so difficult to associate a button to this in the GUI?). Ubuntu used to work fine in the past but now there is too much regression (stuff that used to work doesn’t work in new versions). I’d suggest to them to release less new versions but fix the current issues instead, because I think that most users think like similarly.

Thanks for the thoughts and the thoroughness of describing your position. I agree with you on many of the benefits of OSS that you’ve described. And, for any set of users/organisations there will be some variety in the reasons that bring them to OSS. However, I don’t agree with you about OSS in a business environment. It’s certainly true that if ‘risk management’ is your primary objective then continuing to pay for the devil you know is the safer option. But many businesses are under constant pressure to reduce costs, and there simply doing the ‘same old thing’ isn’t a good course. Moreover, there are lots of situations where risk management is not the primary objective, rather driving innovation is the more important item: and in this context I believe OSS has a lot to offer – Linux and of course Ubuntu!

Steve