The founder of the Ubuntu-project talks in an interview about the integration of proprietary drivers, the One Laptop per Child project and "great applications" from Microsoft.

In the fall of 2004 a new distribution entered the Linux scene: Ubuntu. It's popularity grew quickly, making it the number one Linux distribution according to Distrowatch. Ubuntu was initiated by the South-African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who made a fortune by selling his own company Thawte to Verisign in the Nineties and was therefore able to guarantee the funding for the project. Till today Shuttleworth remains the "face of Ubuntu", Andreas Proschofsky spoke with him - amongst other things - about the current status of the distribution, the competition and the One Laptop per Child project.

derStandard.at: When Ubuntu first appeared on the Linux scene, it was considered a cutting edge distribution. Do you think this is still true nowadays? For instance the current openSUSE seems to integrate quite a bit more cutting edge stuff for the desktop like Beagle / there own main menu / Compiz.

Mark Shuttleworth: Very much so. Of course I respect the stuff that the other distributions do, but I think Ubuntu has a very vibrant community and so some really innovative things happen here first. For example in our newest release Ubuntu is the first distribution to have a complete framework for detecting application failures and crashes and then inviting the users to send information about that failure back to us and we then pass that on to the developers. And that's a fantastic new innovation in terms of being able to raise the quality of the whole desktop experience.

Also we've the fancy 3D-effects, although they are not turned on by default cause we don't think they are yet mature or reliable enough to turn on everywhere.

So in a free software world we can very quickly integrate the good work that comes from other distributions and we also have a strong community to do work on our own.

Full Story.