Archive for July, 2008

Ubuntu Linux goes retail

July 10, 2008 at 7:33 am · Filed under Linux, desktop OS, open source

I picked this up off Slashdot this morning where SirLurksAlot writes that US retailer, Best Buy, is now selling Ubuntu, both through its Web site and in its brick-and-mortar locations. It appears to have quietly been made available since May 6th of this year and is apparently the latest Long Term Support version, Hardy Heron (v8.04 if you prefer).

No mention is made of support facilities over and above those available through the various Ubuntu forums. However, Best Buy does note that the product is published by ValuSoft so presumably that’s where the support can be found. Alas, no. A trip to the technical support web site and a search for the term Ubuntu returns this response: “No products were found to match Ubuntu.”

Nice. So I can buy a nicely packaged copy of Ubuntu from Best Buy for the low, low price of $19.99 or I can download exact the same product, free, grattis and for nothing from the Ubuntu website. Hmmm, tough one.

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Europe ahead of the US in OSS adoption

July 8, 2008 at 3:58 pm · Filed under open source, standards

Interesting research on the pace of open source adoption in different territories was recently conducted by Forrester, the upshot of which seems to be that European IT professionals are ahead of their American counterparts on the adoption curve. Conducted by analysts by Jeffrey Hammond and Diego Lo Giudice, the report finds that open source adoption in most European organisations initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but soon widened to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems.

What gets me is that the tone of the report – or at least the executive summary – seem to imply that the findings were a surprise. Hammond and Lo Giudice write that the professionals they spoke to said that their firms are interested in expanding open source adoption even further and indicated that their firms are less concerned than their North American counterparts about open source security and intellectual property issues.

I guess not living in a litigious society has its benefits.

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