Ubuntu Bug #1 Closed

Ubuntu’s been around since 2004, and if you’ve followed the project at all you’ll realize that the guys at Canonical have really pushed Ubuntu Desktop to be the gateway to Linux for Windows (and Mac) refugees. On August 8th, 2004, Mark Shuttleworth, former CEO of Canonical made an interesting bug report in the Ubuntu bug tracker. The very first bug reported for Ubuntu was titled, “Microsoft has a majority market share”.

If you remember what life was like in 2004, Microsoft Windows XP (and Microsoft in general) was the king of computing for most people. Even Apple wasn’t the giant it is today. Shuttleworth having reported this bug with the intention of Ubuntu and other open source projects being the fix, was a bold and seemingly impossible goal at the time.
Yesterday, this bug was closed, sending quite a message to the computing world.
Now, Ubuntu by no means has replaced Windows in people’s homes. Although, Ubuntu and Linux in general have made great strides considering even the gaming giant Valve released native client for Linux, sending a clear message to the Windows gaming community that Linux desktops are here to stay. Shuttleworth’s reason for closing this bug was more the redefinition of personal computing.

“Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition, with iOS and Android representing a meaningful share.”

With this broader view of what computing means for most people, it’s hard to argue that Microsoft is still the dominant giant it was just a decade ago. Open source and software freedom has won time and time again over the past few years, Canonical and Ubuntu having been a big force behind that.
I personally run Ubuntu desktop on all my machines. For me, Ubuntu and Linux have indeed completely replaced Microsoft in my life. Ubuntu’s success in pushing Linux on the consumer comes from building a solid ecosystem that’s easy to jump into.  Similar to the success iOS and Android have seen, Android also being an open source platform.
More servers are run on Ubuntu than ever before, and it’s continuing to grow. In fact, at VPS.NET, over 29% of deployments are Ubuntu based. Of course Canonical was one of the earliest backers of OpenStack and has made it’s mark in the cloud as well having released Ubuntu Server with very close ties to that project as well.
No matter what side of this you fall on, it’s quite a realization seeing Microsoft not being the heavyweight it used to be.