Thanks for all the Alliteration

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Article from Issue 289/2024
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"We should try to work with these guys. They are just getting started, but I think they might be going places, and it will be good to make the connection." These were the words of Brian, my publisher, 20 years ago, when talking about an upstart new Linux that had recently appeared on the scene.

Dear Reader,

"We should try to work with these guys. They are just getting started, but I think they might be going places, and it will be good to make the connection." These were the words of Brian, my publisher, 20 years ago, when talking about an upstart new Linux that had recently appeared on the scene. This group had a way of looking like a community, but they were strangely more organized and directed than the lovable but too-often chaotic community distros of the era. And the name of this newcomer? It was so unlikely, and yet so memorable – once you heard it, you couldn't forget it: Ubuntu. When you asked them what the name meant, they would say, "It sort of means togetherness, or 'I can be me because you are you,' but the concept is too beautiful to translate directly into English." It is hard to believe that it as been 20 years since the first Ubuntu release. (Yes, it is also hard to believe that I've been doing this job for 20 years, but seriously, I had just started when this happened – I guess that means this is my 20th anniversary also.)

There was so much excitement about Ubuntu in those first few years. Although they were owned and backed by a for-profit company, a lot of volunteers were working for them for free just for the chance to be part of something. But honestly, they didn't act like a for-profit company. They gave their full distribution away – not a scaled-down "community edition." They flew volunteers to exotic meetups in cool European cities. And they really dreamed big. I think they truly wanted to be as ubiquitous as Windows. They even had a crowd-funding effort to launch a mobile phone project at one point, with the dream of converging phone and PC technology.

[...]

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