Mark Shuttleworth: Keeping it FREE

We have to work together to keep free software freely available. It will be a failure if the world moves from paying for shrink-wrapped Windows to paying for shrink-wrapped Linux.

As free software becomes more successful and more pervasive there will be an increasing desire on the part of companies to make it more proprietary. We’ve already seen that with Red Hat and Novell, which essentially offer free software on proprietary terms – their “really free” editions are not certified, carry no support and receive no systematic security patching. In other words – they’re beta or test versions. If you want the best that free software can deliver, a rock solid, widely certified, secure platform, from either of those companies then you have to pay, and you pay the same price whether you are Goldman Sachs or a startup in Rio de Janeiro.

That’s not the vision we all share of what free software can achieve.

Very interesting (and heartening) comments from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Later in the article he talks about the success that Canonical is having attracting corporate customers that are willing to pay for enterprise class support. Nice to see that Ubuntu appears to be answering the nay-sayers and making the business model work. Here’s hoping Ubuntu is around for many more years to come.