14 DAY TRIAL // These days, during July 22 and 24 the first Ubutnulive Conference is taking place in Portland, Oregon. As it is stated on the event's official website, Ubuntu Live is the official meeting place for the worldwide Ubuntu community and its main purpose is to keep the attendees informed on the newest and most interesting features in Ubuntu and also on its related applications.
Sponsored by a series of big names on the IT market, among which Dell Inc., Openmoko, Intel, Sun Microsystems, NComputing, the event also gathers well-known developers from the open source community who try to give the participants a better idea of what Ubuntu stands for. This first Ubuntu Live conference featured, among others, no one other than the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth. Here, Mark made a brief report about Ubuntu's current position on the IT market, claiming that, according to some estimative studies, there are almost 6 up to 12 million machines from more than 200 countries which run Ubuntu; and this statistics reveals only Ubuntu's popularity among the desktop area. Regarding the enterprise market, Mark says that Ubuntu is yet a newbie in the domain, but if it goes on by the current trend, it would soon conquer this segment too.
The Linux OS has already been adopted by many enterprises mainly through their thin clients and dedicated systems. However, Ubuntu is not far from becoming quite a name among the enterprise software market as it has already developed a series of aptitudes which are indispensable for surviving in this domain. According to Mark, one of these requirements that Ubuntu benefits since the latest release, 7.04 a.k.a. Feisty Fawn would be the ability to perform as a virtual machine and serve as platform for better IT system management and monitoring tools. Mark Shuttleworth concluded his keynote by underlining an older idea according to which it would be easier for Linux in general to compete on the enterprise market if all of the major distributions set and stuck to a predictable release cycle.