SCaLE 14x, day 1: Shuttleworth delivers the grand vision for Ubuntu

Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 14x in kicked off yesterday, January 21. The highlight of the was a keynote by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth at UbuCon Summit, a co-hosted event at SCaLE 14x.

Some technical issues with the projector at the beginning of Shuttleworth’s presentation led him to quip that Ubuntu is “moving so fast that we have warped the colors on the screen.”

Shuttleworth praised the differences and diversity in the Ubuntu community. He said the differences in what people are doing and their motivations is what makes the Ubuntu community strong. “There is a great misconception that Ubuntu is what I want,” he said. “It’s not. Ubuntu is the son of what many different diverse groups want. What we struggle and fight for is the framework for collaboration that enables people to get what they want.”

He then talked about how Ubuntu is innovating with changing times: they developed Snappy to offer a much more secure, sandboxed Ubuntu experience to enable people to use Ubuntu in a variety of devices such as drones, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence,  smart cars, etc.

During the Q&A session someone asked about people taking Ubuntu and creating their own stuff with it, by which I assume he meant by derivatives. Shuttleworth said that he thinks that’s a good thing; people can do whatever they want to do with Ubuntu. Then he also mentioned that they are trying to avoid Snappy having the fragmentation Android is experiencing, because irrespective of where you are running Snappy Ubuntu Core, you are running the same code everywhere.

The next big highlight was a Dickens-inspired series of three unconventional talks:

At 7 pm, open source legend, John ‘maddog’ Hall took us back in time to when UNIX was ‘invented’ and explained how a customer would get source code with the machine. Giving source code as part of the purchase was the norm back then, but things changed when AT&T started giving only binaries and would charge more than $100,000 per machine for source code. Gradually this led to operating systems becoming closed source. That’s when Richard M. Stallman started his GNU (Gnu is not Unix) project to create a free and open source operating system.

Next, Jono Bacon of GitHub then took the stage and talked about the current status of Linux and open source, saying ‘We have won’. For evidence of that, one need look no further than the examples of traditional software companies such as Microsoft and Apple embracing open source, not just as consumers but as a contributor.

Then 14 year old Keila Banks took to the stage and talked about the future of open source. Banks is a SCaLE veteran, having delivered her first presentation at SCaLE 11x.

Hall and Bacon returned to the stage to talk about one of the biggest losses to open source world, the unexpected death of Debian founder Ian Murdock.

The day concluded with the much anticipated Linux Sucks stand-up routine by Bryan Lunduke.

Coming up on day 2: Cory Doctorow.