14 DAY TRIAL // The rolling release model has been in the news for some time now, but the founder of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth has stepped in and calmed the spirits by putting things into perspective.
A part of the community, and quite a few developers, are pushing for an Ubuntu rolling release model. This would essentially mean that instead of getting two releases every year, we would get only LTS versions, every two years.
This practice would have some obvious advantages and would be a great relief for the developers who are working to get an Ubuntu OS out the door every six months.
What most developers and users don't realize is that a rolling release model would affect the long-term plans of Ubuntu and their partnerships with IBM, for example.
Mark Shuttleworth had to intervene and calm the spirits of the two sides, expressing his doubts about the rolling release model for Ubuntu.
“The problem for me is straightforward: a rolling release isn’t actually a release at all. It offers little certainty for those who need certainty. And we essentially accommodate the need for daily crack with our development releases, which have become highly usable (for developers) because of the strong commitment the Canonical and community teams made to daily quality throughout the release cycle,” stated Shuttleworth on his blog.
He went on and explained that a rolling release model would impose certain financial pressures on Canonical. For now, it would be better to spend the money on Ubuntu for Phone because it would actually make a much bigger impact.
"We should not spend millions of dollars on that rather than cloud computing or mobile, which have a much broader impact on both society and our commercial prospects," continued Mark.
It seems that so far Mark Shuttleworth is not really impressed with the rolling release model and there are some important issues to address before taking this major step. Maybe the time will come for a new Ubuntu schedule, but it's not in the near future, at least not for the Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life of Canonical.