Interview with Mark Shuttleworth: ask your questions here!

1* Is it possible to buy some small tiny bit stock of Cannonical?
I'm supporting Ubuntu very much but would also like to have some stock from Cannonical lets say 2 à 3000 € ... I think this company will become very big. By the way if I where rich I would do the same as Mark for the Free Software community!

2* Does Google invests in Cannonical?

Do you talk often to Richard Stallman who is the Ghandi of Software. I realy like Stallman's ethical views ... Although they arn't always very practical. I wonder how Mark thinks about Richard Stallman and what points does hé think Stallman is not correct. Does Marc dissagree on some points and what are his opinions.

Onno Timmerman

How much of your time in a day, week, month would you spend in managing the ubuntu proccess. And don't you ever get tired of all our Free Software evangilists?

Are you trying to kill-off the Debian project? Is Ubuntu going to be compatible with Debian stable releases in the future?

Is Canonical ever going to give the Ubuntu name and trademarks to the Ubuntu Foundation or is this going to be your ace in the sleeve?

Do you know you have the same initials as one proprietary software company? Is it incidental that you both aspire for world domination?

The plan is to have a compiz/beryl included in a future version of Ubuntu.
Will Ubuntu include one of them as it is? Or will it be heavilly modified to fit into a 'Ubuntu look'?
Will there be usability studies/tests to take the best out of compiz/beryl and leave what is distracting?
Or will you wait until one of them finally do this and then include it in Ubuntu when it is polished?

Ubuntu's policy is to not developp programs, just use what is available.
Red Hat, Novell and others are participating a lot to open source projects (compiz, OpenOffice). Ubuntu is young and not yet profitable, but do you plan to participate more when is starts to make money?

Ubuntu bugs are incoming A LOT faster in the bugtracker than they can be processed at the moments... are they plans to resolve this?

How is the finance of Ubuntu. Is the 10 mil. $ enough to run Ubuntu the comming years. Ubuntu is growing and has more bug reports etc... Can the current staf handle it. Or does it need more money injections?

What about 10 years from now!

What do you think of the Bill Gates' way of being a philantropist by making a lot of money through closed source software and donating a part of it to charity through the Bill&Melinda Gates foundation?
What is your opinion about Bill Gates and Microsoft?

I would like to ask the introduction of a " Ready for linux- Kernel 2.4.10 or above "
sticker on hardware. That would be great for the users. For example i have got an Usb Flash Pocket Pen Drive that say's on the package ; Support for Linux Kernel 2.4.10 or above without device driver. So it works out of the box with Ubuntu. This is what we need
, so we dont have to sweat it out at an local computer shop , in fear of buying an useless thing that just does not work with linux. Also i would like to know if Ubuntu will be as an oem on Dell in the netherlands. As Dell is making an move in this direction, of supporting linux on one line of their computers.

Thank you very much and keep up the good work.

Dear Mr. Shuttleworth,

As a newbie to Linux jargon I can't quite figure out what the relationship is between the two. As a Mepis user, it seems to be something worth understanding, so I'd love to hear some type of illustration which explains the Mepis-Ubuntu (or Ubuntu-Mepis!) dynamic, such as father/son, or landlord/tenant or something layman-y. (My examples are intentionally simplistic.) I read an article on the subject, http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7900729752.html
and kinda grasped the idea that Mepis is "an Ubuntu-derived distro," but what does that mean for me as a Mepis user? Which leads to:

Is there any advantage to the Linux newbie in using Ubuntu? (Long-time expert pointer-and-clicker, I first tried openSUSE last year after getting up the guts to finally try to dual boot my machine, but it was HORRIBLY complex and none of my DVDs worked! I searched around and tried Mepis, and got nice tips during installation, like "Don't websurf as the root user!" which I hadn't known in SUSE.) Though Mepis is much easier for me than SUSE, is Ubuntu better for hardware compatibility, or ease of use? (For example after hours of sifting through bulletin boards for help, I find a fix which requires writing scripts, something I haven't the faintest notion of.)

I'm reading as much as possible but it's slow going and I find myself still using Windows more than I'd like because I can't operate some applications in Mepis.

Thanks in advance if you have time to answer. -z in japan