Jeff Waugh (LXF 87)

The full text of the Jeff Waugh interview, some of which we couldn't fit in the magazine...

LXF: There is lots of cool stuff in Gnome. Things like Tomboy and F-Spot... 

JW: Yeah, we just haven't been making a bit deal about it.

LXF: They're the reason for using it.

JW: We're talking a lot about the enterprise use cases, making Gnome easy to use and stuff like that, but there's so many really, really cool, geeky kind of rad [radical] features and things you can use.

LXF: What would you pick out as a really geeky part of Gnome?

JW: There are two or three things that I think are really interesting. You know Metacity, the window manager, right? In the README file from Metacity, Havoc said this was the Cheerios of window managers, which is a culturally oblique reference for me but I assume that Cheerios is a boring cereal! Because he talks about how other window managers are like Froot Loops and stuff...

LXF: I can guess what Froot Loops are. [Linux Format's American photographer Jason explains to the English GM and Australian JW that Froot Loops are a "technicolour, sugary, disgusting" cereal.]

JW: So Metacity is just about, "Manage my windows and get out of my way - I don't care about the existence of this thing called the window manager; just do it". Which is exactly what Gnome has been focusing on. It should just work, it's not important. My mum really doesn't give a sh*t about her window manager.

However, there's this really cool thing called Devil's Pie, which is an extra little thing you run. It just plugs in and you can completely script the way Metacity works, using Lisp. Much in the same way you could with Sawfish, except for being a plugin and being directly focused on scripting the window manager. You can do amazing stuff. The work on that has actually been sponsored by Pixar.

LXF: Really? I've never heard of it.

JW: See, we don't make a big enough deal about it. Pixar have very specific work flows and things that they need to adapt because, you know, they've got weird software and they have to kind of mould their work flow around it. And in a very serious way. You have a lot of geeks saying, "I want to customise my desktop to work the way that I like to work," but these people have no idea what real customised workflow kind of stuff is and Pixar had all those kinds of problems.

So originally it uses an XML-style... it was kind of pseudo S-expressions in XML. Then Pixar sponsored Ross Burton, who is a UK guy, works for Opened Hand with Matthew [Allum], to hack on Lisp support for it. He did that, and it's amazing.

LXF: What kind of things was he doing with it?

JW: It turns Metacity into a fully programmable window manager. For instance, take the Gimp. This is a little bit weird compared with other programs because you have all these different windows. If you wanted to program Gimp to open particular windows at different spots and make it so they didn't have any window decoration - you know how when you open Gimp there's that tool box thing, and layers and stuff like that? If you want to make it so the tool box is always in the top left-hand corner and has no window decorations because you never want to move it, just make it sit on the side of your screen; and make it so that all of your image windows are the ones that will receive focus and the only way that the other ones will receive focus is if you were to click on them... [Devil's Pie can do] things like that. You know how there's click to focus versus sloppy focus [where the window is automatically focused when the mouse pointer moves into it] - you can change that per window. So some windows you have to click on... 

I mean, it's really anally-retentive geeky stuff but makes simple things easy and hard things possible. And that's exactly what Devil's Pie does. It's mind-boggling. Pixar actually have a Subversion repository of all of their scripts. It's not public, but the developers basically pull down all of these scripts, pop them into the Devil's Pie home directory configuration thing and then they update these scripts. Devil's Pie automatically reloads the scripts, because it's monitoring that directory for new ones, and it just works.

LXF: That does sound good.

JW: There's this other cool thing called Brightside, which makes the corners and the sides of your desktop reactive to various things. So if you're dragging a window and you drag it to the edge of the screen, it will pop over to the next [virtual] desktop and you'll navigate like that.

LXF: Kind of like Compiz is doing?

JW: Yes. You know how in Enlightenment you used to be able to swing your mouse to the side and things like that? Brightside will let you plug those features into Metacity. Whereas with Enlightenment and KWin and those sorts of things, you have these massive preference windows where you have to go through thousands and thousands of preferences. I mean, we moved away from Sawfish because one of the crazy things with Sawfish is that you could change one preference here and one preference there and they would affect each other and you had to figure out how. We started calling this 'combinatorial brain ****age' because -

LXF: What, officially?

JW: Yes, that is kind of the term we used for reference! Once you have that many preferences they are going to start affecting each other and you start being not able to work out what affects what because there is so much stuff. Whereas having these little modules that you can load and plug in and you can do your own thing... Like, Brightside had this really beautiful preferences window that makes it really clear about things like turning on window dragging to move windows across desktops or swinging your mouse cursor into the top right-hand corner and the screensaver will come on. It's awesome and we don't make a big enough deal about it.

LXF: With Xgl and Compiz, is that going to be built into the window manager?

JW: Compiz is an interesting design. After playing with compositing managers for a while, everyone realised that actually the whole compositing problem is so wed to window management issues that really you have to put it in your window manager. You can do it separately but then you have to communicate backwards and forwards between them.

LXF: It's a nightmare getting them to work with KDE.

JW: Oh really?

LXF: Yes, I suppose it's down to the graphics hardware and the maturity of the drivers - sometimes it works fine, sometimes it doesn't work, but KDE has far more problems than Gnome.

JW: Well, Compiz is like a compositing manager with plugins, and one of the plugins is a window manager that you plug into the compositing manager, which is the weirdest thing when you think about the structure of how X has always worked.

LXF: It's amazing that it works, I think.

JW: Yeah. But it's really beautiful. The one thing with Compiz is that... So, Metacity has a compositing manager as well; they've built it into an existing window manager and added the compositing functions. But for Compiz they have created this great pluggable compositing manager and one of the plugins is a window thing. So it doesn't handle window management stuff as well as Metacity, which has had years and years of bugfixing. They've added a whole bunch of crazy window manager features to Compiz just because it's this crazy...

LXF: Everyone started using it overnight.

JW: Yes, so they haven't really thought about it in terms of, "Let's make a window manager that works and does the right thing", they've just sort of thought, "Hey, crazy Xgl stuff, we may as well start adding all sorts of other crazy stuff." But Compiz is awesome as a technology primer: thinking of it as a demonstration of what the technology is capable of. Wobbly windows, right: people get ill when their windows wobble, that's how bad it is, but it demonstrates what the technology is capable of.  

LXF: I like it! The only thing that really freaks me out is the inside the box button. I can't stand that; you know, with the - 

JW: Oh, that's weird isn't it?

LXF: I thought it would be really, really good but in the end I just wanted to get out.

JW: One of the guys who came to Guadec [Gnome User and Developer European Conference] this year... I was actually really happy: he was sponsored to come and didn't have anywhere to stay, so I said, "Hey, stay in our..." - we have this little bungalow village; Guadec was amazing this year.  

LXF: You've got the best job.

JW:  We had three Canonical people in our bungalow but had room, so I said, "Hey, come along" to this guy Mirco Müller. He has been working on sexy graphics stuff with Cairo, compositing and Xgl and this was his first Guadec. And it really was the best Guadec we've ever had, far and away, just phenomenal. It was in this little Spanish seaside resort village.

Mirco was meeting up with people like David Reveman, Keith Packard, Carl Worth... all these people who had created the technology that he's using to make these beautiful things. Of course they so appreciate that he's making beautiful things with their technology, and he so appreciates the fact that they're making the technology that lets him make this stuff! But they would just start talking, and they'd be sitting there going "Oh, we should do this! And this!", planning all these cool things. He would get back to the bungalow at the end of the day and say [adopts awed voice], "Wow. Man, this is incredible! I talked to Carl about doing this, and so and so about doing this..." 

He would hack in the evenings and make these totally beautiful things, like 3D spinning cubes with animated Cairo stuff on the sides that are transparent so that on your desktop you can see these Cairo things spinning around on a transparent cube. It's GL-rendered but also transparent because of your compositing manager and using Cairo to do all the rendering. It's all fully anti-aliased, vector graphics and fast - really fast. You put these people together and they do the most amazing stuff.

It's really funny: one night we started talking about some work he's doing to clone the Mac OS 10 dock. He's done all this mip-mapping stuff for the icons so they look always really sharp at various zoom levels.

LXF: Are the icons using SVG?

JW: That's the crux of the story, really. The icons themselves are SVG but because we don't have a direct path between the SVG and GL he renders them to bitmaps, and as they scale up he renders them to different sizes.

LXF: Which is where the mip-mapping shows?

JW: Yes. And I was sitting there watching, and I said, "So, can you render an SVG as GL?", because the maths is almost the same. The path between SVG and Cairo (because Cairo is the new vector graphics rendering library that we use in GTK and Gnome development) is a little bit indirect. Traditionally what we have done with SVG is to use librsv, which renders [the image] to a raster bitmap and then you render that, but it's a little bit indirect going to Cairo now. Cairo does have this thing called Glitz, which is a back-end that renders Cairo as GL, so you can kind of get all the way to GL but then you don't really get it as a GL object, you have it on the end of this path over there that you don't really have access to.

So we were talking about what it would be like to take an SVG, turn it into a GL object and be able to render that and play with that on the screen, rather than do any mip-mapping. He started mm-ing and aah-ing and thinking about the cool things we could do with it. Then we talked about this to Keith and Carl, and Keith began explaining why that was exactly the right thing to do with X. Before Xgl, because Xgl is an X server that is a GL client and renders everything as GL, X has had support for this thing called Glx - stupidly confusing!

LXF: You get used to it.

JW: Well, yeah. [Laughs] Glx is the extension that lets you send GL commands over X. So if you have a thin client and a machine over there, you can run a program over here that does GL and it will be hardware-accelerated.

It turns out this is exactly the right way of doing really sexy GL stuff. What you do is, over here you transform the SVG into GL. Even better than that, Keith started saying, you turn it into a GL macro over there and you send the object and everything as a macro over to the server, whether it's local or over the network. Then when you've got a GL macro that's processed in hardware, you can tweak that. Rather than say, "re-render this, re-render that" and so on, you can say, "Take this macro over there that I've already uploaded and scale it up by 50%." And because most of it is already in the hardware, you're sending this tiny little command and it knows exactly what to do.

We can actually improve network rendering using GL. Imagine a tiny little thin client with beautiful Intel graphics chip etc and doing full hardware-accelerated stuff over the network, using less bandwidth than you did before.

LXF: Better than VNC!

JW: Yeah - holy cow! All these people who are saying X is rubbish, X is 30 years old and we should get rid of it - the rendering infrastructure development that's been happening in the last few years proves that X is a technology that has 30 years' worth of value not 30 years' worth of crud.

The other thing is in embedded technology. We had a meeting in Guadec about embedded work going on with Gnome, because there are a lot of companies working on embedded: we've got Nokia doing 770, PalmSource's new infrastructure is based on GTK and GStreamer, Garmin are building products around it, then there are lots of little consulting companies doing stuff. All of these people do tests with DirectFB. Everyone thinks, "Ooh, it's DirectFB, it's got a framebuffer - it's got to be fast!" X is many, many times faster, because it's had that time of people using it and optimising it. It's pretty cool!

LXF: What is it that changed with the Gnome project over the two and a half years? Where did all this impetus come from? When I first started using Linux -

JW: What sort of versions?

LXF: Oh, it was 1-point something. I was using KDE over it - it had just got under 2.0. Then, Gnome was very much trying to catch up with KDE. For years - [Waugh makes a face] OK, not 'catch up', but it had a very different philosophy from KDE: still does, in my mind.

JW: That changed with 2.0 [released in June 2002]. It's funny how things have changed: Gnome was the hacker's desktop with all of the crack.

LXF: But I mean recently: things like F-Spot and Mono and all of these things that you've been talking about. That seems to me like a renaissance, almost. It started with everything becoming simplified, and the project's rationalisation, and probably seeing how ridiculous KDE had got.

JW: [Laughs] So, 2.0 was a real turning point in terms of our philosophy of what we were trying to do. The way that I've been talking about it in talks about Gnome is that as a group we matured and realised that there's a really, really deep philosophical reason for what we've done and that is that free software is not just for geeks.

It was so funny listening to Eben's talk [at OSCon] because... Eben Moglen is an absolutely amazing speaker and I hope that at some stage I can emulate the way that he speaks so passionately, without notes and so coherently - and I hope to do that without ever going to law school - but it was really funny that he was echoing a lot of the things that I... He has been saying these things for a long time, but a lot of what he said was quite similar to what I said in a closing keynote that I gave at Fosdem. I was sitting there thinking, "Mmm, I thought I did OK in my Fosdem talk, but..." - and I had more response to that talk than I'd had for any other talk - "... man, I wish I could do it the way Eben does it." But I realised that I have a different perspective on exactly the same message. He's coming at it from one direction, the legal side, licensing and all those sorts of things, and I'm coming at it from the Gnome desktop user angle.

It's fundamentally important that the amount of value that we get from free software and the fact that our 'big' freedoms - freedom of association, freedom of speech - are being protected by our using free software as a tool. But my mum doesn't get that. She doesn't see the threat that technology can pose or the freedoms that we can defend with free software. So it's fundamentally important that we change people's understanding of software and their expectations of software. And the Gnome Project took this on as a basic philosophical tenet.   

LXF: How did that happen? Did everyone realise it at the same time?

JW: It was a whole bunch of things that all happened at once. Leaders in the community brought people together around these ideas, and what we actually thought was important. Ultimately the question comes down to... I asked at Guadec last year, "How many of you write software chiefly for your own self-interest?" About 10 people from 500 put their hand up. Then I said, "How many of you write software primarily for the use of others?" and everyone put their hand up. That's the perspective of the Gnome Project. We absolutely do scratch our own itch but the focus is absolutely on making software for users, for the growth and expansion of software freedom and the protection of the big freedoms through that. Because how are people like my mum going to be able to do that?

Part of that was the change to, "If free software is not just for geeks, then you have to make the software accessible." I show people the global panel preferences dialog in Gnome 1.4 - there's something like five tabs, it's the most ridiculous thing -

LXF: Have you shown your mum GConf?

JW: GConf is an infrastructural kind of thing. But you know, one of the funny things about this dialog is that there's a tab called Miscellaneous - miscellaneous preferences, right? - and then within that tab there's a frame titled Miscellaneous. That's how extreme 1.4 was. In 2.6, that was completely gone.

Those things that we had in that dialog are not benefits to users. They're not features. They're things that should just work. Obviously, simplifying things, making things just work was a bit part of it.

LXF: I was speaking to Michael Meeks, and he was saying that you'd video-ed people using Gnome to see where they struggled. Do you still do that kind of thing?

JW: Yeah, and have you seen betterdesktop.org? It's where Novell have done a bunch of usability studies based on user on video. They asked them to do things like, find this file, print this file, install this application and all things like that, and just watched the user to see what the did. If they cried then obviously there was a bit of work to do!

But it's absolutely amazing to see what people do with their software. Interesting as it is, I suppose you could cut or edit the mother-in-law story coming up... My mother-in-law has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for some time, and recently she called me and said, "Oh, thank you for fixing the OpenOffice.org bug." But I knew that it was extremely unlikely that in Breezy, which is what she was running, we'd actually done an OpenOffice bugfix release - everyone at the time was working on Dapper. So I asked her to describe to me how it was fixed, so she described a bug that she'd told me about a few months back, and what it did now, and how it was fixed. And I asked, "Did you do an update?", and she said yes, so I asked her how that worked. "Well," she said, "the little flashing light came up on my thing that said you have updates ready, so I clicked on it, and it had some things to update as usual, but at the top it also said there was a new version of Ubuntu available, would I like to upgrade? So I clicked on Upgrade..." and here's me on the phone going "uunnngghh"!

LXF: The upgrade must have taken the whole night?

JW: Well, it was really funny. [Ubuntu] has this nice little graphical thing that leads you to the upgrade, and she said, "Oh, and it was really quick!" She was saying that because she has recently got DSL at home - she lives in a small town - so she has 250k DSL. She did the upgrade on that and she thinks that a day of downloading stuff is really quick!

But she did that, rebooted, came back up and the OpenOffice bug was fixed. She told me she loves the new artwork, all these interesting new things that she can play with and so on. I was sitting there going, "Aaaaaargh - er, Pia [Waugh's wife]?" I eventually got the business card of Michael Faulks, who wrote the upgrading system (he's one of the Ubuntu guys). She demanded that when I went to the Ubuntu developer summit that I thank him, and he was overjoyed, and said, "Oh, that's the best news I've ever had!" 

LXF: Actually, back at the office we have had quite a few problems installing from the Live CD of Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I know a lot of people have complained about it; I have had a lot of difficulties myself. I know it was a really last-minute inclusion anyway, wasn't it?

JW:  Yes, it was a new feature for Dapper, which was a bit dangerous. But we really wanted to get it in because, you know our ShipIt stuff [where Canonical will send a disc to anyone that requests it]?  We'd been shipping two CDs: a Live CD and an install CD. And we really wanted to give people, firstly the Live CD install experience: you've got full desktop, you can do the install -

LXF: It makes a hell of a difference.

JW: It beautiful, isn't it? The fact that you can play games, you can experience the desktop, you can talk to your friends, you can use web browsers and get help... that's really important. But also, by having a Live CD installer we only needed to ship one CD. With ShipIt sending out multimillion CDs, that makes things quite a bit cheaper.  

Unfortunately, because it was a new feature in Dapper there have been some problems with it.

LXF: So, why did you leave Canonical?

JW: [Laughs] Basically, in three or four years there may be some babies on the scene (I've just had my first wedding anniversary). I want to take a risk and do something a bit dangerous, and if I don't do it now I'm not going to have the time to do it. I sat down for a deep and meaningful with my wife, and said, "I've got these ideas for things that I want to do so that I can work on Gnome a little bit more than I have done." I had a period a few years back when I'd been doing a lot of consulting freelance and earning quite a bit of money so I had some savings, so I did some irregular work while working on Gnome pretty much full time for about nine months.

LXF: And that's just what you want to do again?

JW: Yeah. Canonical's been fantastic, a really great bunch of people. And Ubuntu has done wonders for the expansion of free software and those sorts of things. I had a lot of fun pimping it, because I've been doing evangelism around the world. But my first love is really Gnome.

LXF: Couldn't you have done something like that and stayed at Canonical?

JW: It's kind of funny. People say of a lot of the free software hackers that are employed by companies, "Oh hey, but you're paid full time to work on 'blah'", but it doesn't really turn out that way. It wouldn't be financially sensible for Canonical to fund me full time to work on Gnome. One of the things to remember about Canonical is that they're a small startup; they're not making money - not a profit anyway. They spend a lot of money on ShipIt and those sorts of things. It's a small tight team and they don't have an outrageous burn rate or anything like that, so it just wouldn't make sense for Canonical to do that [fund me to work on Gnome]. I've got to figure out how to do it myself!

LXF: You're not going to be financed by the Gnome Foundation or anything like that?

JW: No. The Gnome Foundation is doing OK at the moment and making quite a bit of money; but it's going to take a while to build up funds and have the financial model to be able to hire people. So I'm not really expecting to work for the Foundation. Maybe sometime in the future would be cool. What I'm doing is now is, technically I'm going to be a partner in Pia's company. Her old surname was Smith. Pretty boring surname. Now she has the surname Waugh. I've had many years of coping with jokes about Waugh, but it's a novelty for her, so her company is called Waugh Partners.

And she's been doing funny things with it, like... She does open source consulting and strategic development for industry. Because a lot of companies don't really know about open source, and if they hire someone like Red Hat to teach them, Red Hat will teach them about Red Hat. Which is fine; that's what they do. But there's room out there for someone who can teach you about how open source can be relevant to your company and what it can do for you. So Pia's been doing that. She's ex-president of Linux Australia [the non-profit Linux organisation] and extremely well connected. One of the things she's been doing lately is that kind of training and she's decided she wants to called it Waugh Paths.

Anyway, technically I'll be working for that company but I'm not really going to be doing similar stuff to her.

LXF: It'll be really good to see how you do. I'd love to do something like that.

JW: It's pretty crazy, but if I don't do it now I'll be kicking myself forever.

LXF: How has Canonical taken it? Are they going to fill your role with someone else? [Jono Bacon has recently joined as the new Ubuntu community manager]

JW: Benjamin Mako-Hill was working for Canonical a while back and he left about a year ago to go and work for MIT Media Lab. He was going to do the internal community kind of stuff, and I've been doing a lot of external evangelism and what I describe as business and community development. But one of the things that I've been wondering as I've been thinking about [leaving] is, how do you get a job as an evangelist? And how do you employ someone as an evangelist?

LXF: You have an epiphany, I think.

JW: Right [Laughs]. He's taking photos up my nose! [referring to the Blow-up like action shots being taken by Jason] Where was I? Yes, it's really bizarre thinking about... you know, Ubuntu was such a fantastic vision and was -

LXF: How did you get involved in Canonical in the first place?

JW: Mark [Shuttleworth] gave a friend of mine Robert Collins a call at LCA 2004 [linux.conf.au], which was in Adelaide. Rob at the time was working on the Arch revision control system at TLA [the original Arch repository, named after the original developer, Tom Lord], and one of the things Mark knew he wanted to do, part of his vision, was distributed revision control and how that is the next step for collaboration in the open source world. And he looked at Arch and felt that Arch and the ideas behind it were the right way of looking at things. So he called Rob Collins at LCA, chatted to him for a while and told him about what he wanted to do. At the time Rob was director of a company that was doing consulting and development and he was quite happy with what he was doing, but Mark offered this crazy idea that sounded really compelling. I kind of forgot about it but I now remember Rob coming up to me at LCA and saying, "Oh my God, I just got the most amazing phone call! I can't tell you anything about it, but I will at some stage..." 

LXF: He's been to space!

JW: [Laughs] Stuff like that happens all the time in the IT industry, so I just thought, "Some way-out wacky thing has happened - we'll figure it out later."

Anyway, Mark was actually on his way to Antarctica - 

LXF: As you do...

JW: [Laughs] - on an ice-breaker, and he took six months of Debian mailing list archives with him.

LXF: What a brilliant idea!

JW: Yes, because he knew that his downtime on this ice-breaker would be pretty boring, so he could do some reading. His goal with that was to find out who were the great Debian contributors that he wanted to employ. That's one of the best things about hiring in the open source world: everyone's work is out there.

On his way back he met up with Rob in Sydney, and Rob was really keen for it [on working full time on Arch at Canonical]. Rob knew that what I was working on fit into Mark's vision, so he said, "Look, you've got to meet this friend of mine, he's in Sydney." At the time I was working for an ISP that was going down the gurgler, and I had just taken my staff out to lunch to tell them that we had 90 days left. It was horrible, it was so depressing. Well, Rob called me and said, "Dude, you've got to come down and meet this guy," and I said, "It's a really inappropriate time - I've just had this two-hour lunch with my staff, I've got work to do... let's do it another day." But Rob told me I had to come straight away because this guy was only going to be here for a day, and we had this conversation, back and forth, then he said, "OK, fine. Have you ever met anyone who's been in space?" I said, "No." "Do you want to?" "Yes."  "Come down and see him now. There might be a job in it." Ding! "OK, in that case..."

So I put down the phone and went down to Circular Quay [in Sydney], saying, "Bye guys, I've got stationery to pick up," or something, and met this guy. Theoretically I knew about 'the millionaire South African guy who went to space', but didn't know much of the back story. Mark is a total celebrity in South Africa, but outside South Africa people didn't really hear much about him.

Well, we sat down and he laid out his vision. The first thing he said was, "I want to create a Linux distribution."  I was pretty much ready to stand up and walk out, because at that time it sounded like the stupidest thing ever. But then he started explaining his vision behind it, the model and what it all meant. Even back then he was absolutely clear on things like six-monthly releases, Gnome desktop, single CD, making it absolutely free to redistribute, building support networks on top, distributed revision control and building up the operational effectiveness of the developers working on the distribution, going for a completely different model from what the other Linux distributions had and, this is one of the crucial points, building it on top of Debian.

I think a lot of people had been sitting back waiting for someone to do the right thing with Debian. Because it's this incredible project... it really is the number two distribution. There's Red Hat and people talk about SUSE  but Debian has had way more use than SUSE ever has. It's kind of the original enterprise Linux. But it's never had a company to take what the community has done and really take it out there and get it into people's hands. With my experience in the Gnome project, I know that Gnome would be nothing, nowhere near what it is today without the involvement of Sun, Red Hat, Novell, Canonical... all these companies. Because they take the work that we do as a community and make it real for end users. That's something that the Gnome community itself can't do. And that's not saying bad things about Debian, it's just the reality of development. The change in Mozilla and Firefox and how they work... is that they've done it themselves but they've had to change, in a way, to be able to do that.   

LXF: Or recognised that things were changing, and not fought it.

JW: Yeah. Now, if you look at Google Trends for searches on 'Firefox' and 'Ubuntu'... Ubuntu: there's lots of noise about it, right? But Firefox is up here and Ubuntu is down here, so the relationship is quite different.  Firefox has had this massive effect on people understanding why open source matters, so it's really important. They wouldn't have been able to do that without taking the kind of changes.

So everything Mark said smelled right. It was like, why hasn't anyone done this yet? It was getting out of that enterprise Linux model where you have the little sandbox for the kids to play in and an enterprise one which is taken seriously. I've been doing some Red Hat admin recently with Enterprise Linux (the Gnome Project uses it). One of the things I noticed about it is that there's no community. Whereas with Ubuntu and Debian there's a massive community. People are doing packages for it; there's like 10,000, 15,000 packages available. It's a different model, so you want to take advantage of all the great things that open source has to offer. Part of that is free beer, right?  That's a big thing. People don't understand freedom up front; they understand quality and then they understand why it's so good, and that's the freedom.

So everything he said, I thought, "Wow, you really understand how the model is working and what's going on in the industry." Also I wasn't going to have a job in 90 days! But Rob was really happy where he was and the idea of going to a start-up for him was pretty crazy. It is risky, and all of the people who started working for Canonical had experience with dotcom companies. Mark said a lot of things that made us trust that he wasn't going to do silly dotcom things: he was going for a low burn rate, he was going to concentrate on the core ideas of what we were doing, and the commercial side of it - he wasn't just some sugar daddy, he was very, very involved.

He got the cream of the Debian crop. People who had been working on Debian and making it this fantastic platform for years and years and had kind of been ignored by the rest of the distribution world - no one had employed them. But these guys are absolutely fantastic. Matt Zimmerman, who had been doing security stuff, is now the CTO of Ubuntu, so he leads up the Ubuntu distribution team: amazing stuff. There are 20 people on the distribution team, grown from about 12 at the beginning. The last four releases and the growth that Ubuntu has had in the past two years is based on 20 employed people's work and their ability to build a community.

LXF: When you put it like that it does sound impressive.

JW: And in terms of commercial interest, it's grown... our business models were already on year two, one year in. So many people looked at the model, what it was like - even the very first preview release we did, people just said, "That's it, that's what I've been looking for."