14 DAY TRIAL // Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the famous Ubuntu Linux distribution has left an interesting Keynote on aKademy, which seems to have been taken quite seriously by the open source community members.
According to Mr. Shuttleworth, there is something that could bring more organization in the open source world. The solution he proposed was the establishment of a fixed time frame and a releasing cycle for the main open source exponents: K/Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, the kernel and maybe even OpenOffice all releasing in the same time frame.
"If you guys articulate it and make a commitment to shipping something round about the same time as Gnome did, we would made a converse commitment and that is we'll ship your stuff very shortly after you do ... The biggest advantage would be that a recent KDE would be included in each new Kubuntu release: this would give the users a much better experience and it would also mean much faster feedback for the KDE developers. Also, the drumbeat resulting from this release commitment would be enormous: K/Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, the kernel and maybe even OpenOffice all releasing in the same time frame would create a rhythm hard to ignore", said Mark Shuttleworth.
According to the KDE's blog editors, these comments made by Mr. Shuttleworth have "certainly prompted heated discussion, which is still going on". Shuttleworth also spoke in his presentation, called 13 Lessons for the Free Desktop, about the challenge of keeping free software really "free". The release schedule, approximated by Mark at six-months, is already taken into consideration by the KDE Project, which is now about to release its version 4 of the famous desktop environment later this year while Ubuntu Linux has become renowned for delivering a new version of its operating system every six months.