14 DAY TRIAL // The "Best Linux Distribution" award from the Enterprise Open Source Magazine's Readers went this year to Canonical's Ubuntu. The award was announced at the 2007 Enterprise Open Source Conference. The winners of the Readers' Choice Awards were announced by SYS-CON, the parent publishing company for Enterprise Open Source Magazine.
The 11th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2007, co-located with the Second Annual Enterprise Open Source Conference, took place in New York City, at Roosevelt Hotel, during June 25-27, 2007.
"The Ubuntu community and our end-users strive to create and work with a version of Linux that is simple, elegant and easy to use. "The Readers' Choice Award" is another proof point that we are achieving our goals and meeting the needs of the greater computing community", commented Jane Silber, Director of Operations with Canonical Ltd.
Ubuntu Linux, developed by Canonical Ltd., is a Debian/GNU based distribution aiming at targets such as usability, regular releases, and ease of installation. The name of the distribution comes from the African concept of ubuntu which may be rendered roughly as "humanity toward others". It is a highly user-friendly distro, coming with a suite of pre-installed applications such as OpenOffice.org, Firefox web browser or the GIMP raster graphics editor. Ubuntu packages have generally been based on packages from Debian's unstable branch: both distributions use Debian's deb package format and APT/Synaptic to manage installed packages. The most recent version, Ubuntu 7.04 (a.k.s. Feisty Fawn), was released this April. Version 7.10 (codename Gutsy Gibbon) is scheduled for release on October 18, 2007.
Currently funded by Canonical Ltd. on July 8, 2005, Ubuntu also enjoys the support of the Ubuntu Foundation, which provided an initial funding of US$10 million, created by Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, as an emergency fund in case Canonical's support would cease.