A conversation with Mark Shuttleworth over fine food and fine football

What a perfect day. I’m in London today, and went to the Arsenal vs. Bolton match with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. Mark isn’t a big football fan, but he indulged my Arsenal fixation and even treated me like a rational human being, which I decidedly am not when it comes to football. Arsenal won 2-1. All is right in the universe.

But where the day got really interesting was over dinner at Tamarind, one of my favorite restaurants anywhere. I’ve long respected Mark, but over dinner I found him engaging both as a person and as a technology visionary. Here is a very real, good person who has happened to be phenomenally successful as an entrepreneur, without letting it turn him into an obnoxious Muppet.

Some of the insights I gleaned throughout the course of our dinner:

• Mark has the potential to fundamentally change the economics of enterprise software. I once derided Mark for an incomplete understanding of how enterprise software works, and what enterprises expect from their vendors. I was wrong. Mark walked me through some of the things he/Ubuntu is working on. One project, in particular, struck me as profoundly ingenious and something that has the potential to dramatically disturb the established way of doing software, including open source software development.

  Mark is already disruptive to the Linux (and general operating system) market because, to a certain extent, he’s not subject to market forces. Because of past success, he’s able to fund Ubuntu, and can do so indefinitely. As a savvy investor, however, Mark’s plan is to have Ubuntu fund itself. It’s how he plans to do this that I find fascinating and of huge importance for every company involved with open source software development…which is increasingly just about everyone.

• Core and periphery. Mark said something that I found extremely interesting, and intuitively correct: it’s better to have multiple forks of your project than a single fork. Multiple forks means the community tends to choose between “core” and “periphery.” A single fork means it chooses between two visions of “core,” and you’ll likely lose that battle 50% of the time.

  So (and this is my extrapolation, not Mark’s, so blame me if it sounds Sun T’zu-ish), radical openness is in many ways better than semi-openness, because the more you allow your project to be forked, the more value accrues to the core project. This has long benefited Red Hat and SUSE – there are many other Linux distributions, but they’re periphery. What happens, though, if Ubuntu becomes considered “core,” as it gains traction with the development community…?

• Web 2.0 and open source. I’ve been beating the enterprise drum for so long now that it took some Web 2.0 thoughts from Mark to jar me out of my conservative views. Mark is convinced – and I agree with him, though I’m not smart enough to fully follow his thinking on it yet – that there must be a way to derive data from user interactions with code that could fund the development of the code itself, without charging for it. As I’ve suggested, perhaps MySQL could be doing this with the modifications developers make to its database, or with the stored data itself, if a way could be found to provide enough value that it could overcome privacy concerns? Not sure….
• Disruption depends on…disrupting. Hybrid models are primarily “bad” because they don’t allow a vendor to truly, completely disrupt a market. It’s like trying to keep one foot in the proprietary world and the other in the disruptive, open source world. Some do this better than others but, on balance, more value for the vendor (and customer) is lost by this halfway approach than is gained. To be disruptive, you must burn your own boats before you can burn down others’.
• Microsoft’s patent game is designed to force open source to compete on its terms. Mark made a hugely salient point on this: Microsoft has been a disruptive force in the software industry by building complex software and essentially giving it away for peanuts.

  In turn, it is being challenged by open source, which is free. The difference, as Mark said, between $0.00 and $0.01 is huge. And that difference is not flattering to Microsoft, even despite its lower price points than its fellow proprietary competitors.

  But if Microsoft can place a patent tax on all open source software or, at least, the open source software most threatening to its business, then it provides an effective way to inhibit open source disruption. (See above: this applies most forcefully when an open source vendor goes 100% open source and, hence, 100% disruptive. “Free” is the best tool to pound Microsoft with, not “mostly free.”) Take “free” away from open source, and you remove some of its allure, and much of the distribution benefits it has.

  In other words, Microsoft’s patent tax is not designed to protect its intellectual property, but rather to protect its preferred, comfortable way of doing business. Novell was its dupe in this charade. Hopefully, others won’t follow suit, and Novell will pull out of the agreement. There is no way that this patent agreement is good for anyone; it is only good for protecting 20th Century software business models.

That’s enough for now. I greatly enjoyed my time with Mark, and look forward to checking in with him during my trips to the UK. He has the potential to be one of the most influential and disruptive forces in the software industry. It seems to me that he’s well on his way.