Interview with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu and Thawte founder

By Vasudev Ram

Saw this interview today via Twitter. The interview is on the Binpress site.

It is an interview of Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, and of the Thawte certificate authority before that.

Excerpts from the interview that I found interesting:

[ I think it’s really important in open source that we recognize that it’s good when you have that sort of diversity. If we said we only need one way to cache content on the web, well then you wouldn’t have Squid, and you wouldn’t have Varnish, and you wouldn’t have nginx, and you wouldn’t have HAProxy, and any other number ofvery useful tools that people have created. ]

[ There are operating systems and manufacturers that have an agenda. It’s easy to put out quite emotional language, emotive language saying, “Oh. Don’t trust the other guys.” But really the question that has to be asked, what’s your agenda, and trying to stop people from investing in open source. Right? This comes back to, I think, what it’s like to be an open-source developer.

There’s a lot of sledging that goes on. Amongst perhaps the less thoughtful members of the open-source community, it’s very easy and fun, sometimes fun just sort of pile on to that sledging. Well, hold on a sec. As an open source user, you benefit tremendously from that kind of innovating, and competition, and diversity. To trash that is very self-defeating as a user. ]

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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