Linux User and Developer spoke exclusively to the founder of Ubuntu as part of their exciting relaunch issue. Here’s an excerpt from the new magazine due on sale 30 July.

When did you first become interested in Linux?
That goes back to the 1990s, when getting set up on the internet was a big deal. And people who were interested in the internet were flocking to Linux as an internet-ready platform. There were various versions of Linux at the time. Debian caught my attention because it was organised along lines that scaled very nicely. Instead of there being some top-down hierarchy of priorities, they were organised from the bottom up. People could self-organise around projects they were interested in. I was interested in web servers, and there was no Debian package for a web server. So I packaged up Apache. It was a combination of really liking the social structure of Debian and the way it was organised, combined with a practical need to have a web server.

Today, Debian has a reputation of being a bit of a grumpy distribution. Do you think the Debian community has become more unapproachable since the 1990s?
It’s interesting how those reputations arrive and grow and become self-fulfilling. If you have a reputation for that long, you tend to attract people who are looking for that. I think there are more compelling parts of Debian. I think of Debian as having the basic mechanism in place to have that ideal mix of application-specific expertise and general system quality. It doesn’t always work out that way, and sometimes there are packages that aren’t maintained, but in principle at least, because of the way they’re organised, you should be able to get experts to maintain the package.

Many of the things that define Debian socially, really come through in the product. One of the great advantages of Debian is that they’ve refused to narrow the scope to one use-case. It’s a platform that’s very malleable. Those discussions often bear a lot of fruit in the generality of the system. Debian is one of those platforms that’s really easy to shape into something you didn’t know it could be beforehand. We have a more narrow focus in scope and time. Those approaches complement each other nicely. We’re in a line of conversation with Debian about the timing of our LTS [long-term support] release, which was not that far off from Debian’s stated next preferred release. That presents an opportunity to collaborate in a way that we had not before. It would be destructive to co-ordinate on a micro level, but there is an opportunity for macro collaboration. Initial signs have been encouraging. We’re looking through the details of that to see if we can make it worthwhile. If we do pull that off, I think it will be a really fantastic counter-example to people who think Debian and Ubuntu are at odds with one another. This would be systemic. We’d agree on core components for a release. If that works well between Debian and Ubuntu, I would hope we can reach out to Suse and Red Hat.

Have the various Linux distributions caused Linux itself to fragment as a platform?
It’s a really obvious concern that Linux is fragmented, and that that’s destructive. The nature of the fragmentation is very subtle. Look at Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux, for example. Literally, the stated goal is to be exactly the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They took pains to say both things. On the one hand, we care about scalability. Unbreakable Linux is about as compatible with Red Hat as one could be: much closer than even a standard setting process could get you. In 99.9% of cases, exactly the same. And yet it represents a bridge too far for all sorts of applications. As much as we’d like to pretend it is, it’s not Red Hat. If you want to address fragmentation, don’t fool yourself that you can do it through standards.
Administrators and CIOs are just going to say “it’s different,” even if it’s exactly the same source code. How much more fragmented is a landscape that includes everything from Debian to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? There’s a fallacy that says we can write a document that will be a standard, and that will unfragment Linux. That’s not true. There a few brands with orthogonal things they’re recognised for. There are other spaces and other brands to fill. What Linux gives you is what other systems don’t have. Linux
gives you the ability to have lots of other innovations going on at the same time. That results in very rapid innovation on the edges of the system. The strongest ideas and the strongest brands survive.

Is the Linux Foundation helping to heal fragmentation wounds?

I think the Linux Foundation played a very important role in the ecosystem. They speak very powerfully for the whole Linux commercial community. They provide a single response to the moves and commentary that comes from proprietary players. They are also a neutral force for collaboration. They’ve led some significant efforts: big efforts around the automated testing of Linux. They organised a lot of conferences that bring major players from brands and interest groups together. I think they play an important role, but I think unfragmenting Linux by anything other than market forces is unlikely.

You can read the rest of this interview in the relaunch issue of Linux User & Developer on sale 30 July  WHSmiths, newsagents and supermarkets