Catching up with Canonical’s CEO, Jane Silber – exclusive interview

In the past, you have mentioned the importance of the “Systers” email community in supporting you as a young woman in IT. Do you think there is enough done to encourage women to get involved in IT and particularly OSS and what is the state of the Ubuntu Women Initiative and the Women’s Group?
While there are many excellent resources and initiatives for women in the industry, there is still a real imbalance in the industry and in the open source community. Ubuntu Women is thriving, and I think they have made a real difference in the Ubuntu community and in working with other teams such as our Local Community, or LoCo, teams. Ubuntu Women really are doing great work. One of the things that is interesting to me about the team is that they aren’t just an internally focused support group for women already in the open source community or Ubuntu, but also trying to highlight some of the real root issues driving the imbalance. For example, the team recently organised a competition for World Play Day [4], and the results will be announced shortly before this interview appears.

At last year’s LinuxCon, there was a lot of talk of the PC desktop not mattering any more for Linux (Mark was asked about this after his keynote). Does the PC desktop still matter as much as it has in the past to Canonical? Do you still believe, for example, there will be the ever-illusive ‘year for Linux on the desktop’?
With over 250 million PCs sold a year, the desktop remains a key part of people’s computing experience and a priority for Canonical. It is not a complete solution in this world of ubiquitous computing, and the core of the Ubuntu platform extends very nicely up and down the spectrum of devices.
I’m not sure how to define a ‘year for Linux on the desktop’. Fundamental shifts in an industry, like the shift open source is driving in the IT industry, happen gradually and I suspect there will be greater consensus of a tipping or turning point with the benefit of hindsight. Ubuntu has already been at the heart of major steps forward in terms of introducing Linux on the desktop to a significantly larger and wider audience, and in terms of making Linux on the desktop available through a wide variety of OEMs around the world.

With Canonical running in-house teams to develop elements of Ubuntu (graphic design, usability etc), is this because there are elements of a desktop OS which you think are not fully delivered through community development? Does design by community/committee really work or does it lose some of the clarity and voice that makes great design/creative really great?
Upping the ante on design and user experience in Ubuntu and the open source community is one of the most exciting things we’re working on right now. And while there has been a lot of good user experience work in various projects in the past, practices and processes that have been optimised for collaboratively writing software don’t necessarily translate to the discipline of design. We continue to explore new ways of working between Canonical and the community. For example, at our recent Ubuntu Developer Summit we included a Design track for the first time. That produced some really productive conversations, not just about aspects of Ubuntu design but also how to get more people involved in user research, detailed discussions about font design from one of the world’s leading font designers, and colour management challenges caused by a given colour looking very different on different monitors.

We announced a year ago that this was going to be a focus, and I’m really pleased with the results this far. But there is still a lot of work to do in this area, on the software and the best practices for the open source community. ‘Design by committee’ typically doesn’t work well, but we’re learning more every day about what models do work well, how to apply the typically distributed open source community approach to something that traditionally has thrived in close-knit co-located teams. And we’re trying to help spread those practices. For instance we launched the ‘Hundred Papercuts’ project, and it’s been rewarding to see that meme be picked up by other projects as well. And we’ve been working with upstream projects such as Empathy to not just conduct user research, but also to do some meta-research on how developers interpret and react to the results of user research. Overall, I believe the focus on design and user experience is a rising tide that will lift all open source boats.

With Novell now up for sale, how has this effected interest in Ubuntu and could a buyout make SUSE a stronger competitor?
We haven’t seen many repercussions from discussions about a potential Novell sale. The potential for an acquisition does introduce some uncertainty around future plans and priorities, but I’m sure the Novell management and any new owners will manage that appropriately. I think everyone is simply in a ‘wait and see’ mode – there are simply too many unknowns now to predict how a buyout may positively or negatively impact SUSE. In terms of the ‘number 2’ spot, I think that given the widespread use of Linux it’s difficult to maintain a single ranking. In most surveys, Ubuntu comes out on top in terms of desktop usage and Ubuntu Server is the most widely deployed guest OS in the public cloud.

What, for you, is the most exciting area of open source and free culture at the moment?
I am very interested in the way open source culture is spreading to domains beyond software, and what we can learn from those movements and apply back to software. For example, in addition to producing amazing content and collaborations, I think it’s interesting to explore how open source and free culture in the arts, film and music may produce an ethos and set of practices which in turn can inform and improve the OSS community and culture.

Click here to see what else was in issue 89 of Linux User & Developer magazine.