The Ubuntu Utah Team participated in the Utah Multi-Distro Release Party today. We heard presentations from the three major distributions that have had a release within the last month. Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, Fedora 8 “Werewolf” and openSUSE 10.3. We also heard a presentation from some of the local OSX nerds. I’ll give it to OSX for building some very intuitive graphical interfaces, but this didn’t get too much focus as it is non-free of course.
We had a great response from the community today and I was glad to be able to help represent Ubuntu at the event. We handed out CDs, Ubuntu stickers and helped quite a few people install and upgrade. It’s good to see the Free Software community grow, even if we are using different distributions. I will note, however, that in the spirit of Ubuntu I did have to point out that we should all better get along. Until my quick presentation and a reminder of the Ubuntu spirit there was a lot of “this distro sucks”, and “that distro sucks”. I am really glad to be part of a distribution that can try to remember to get along. It’s not about teams here guys, we’re all about Free Software, and should remember that.
Congratulations to the Fedora team and the openSUSE team for greatly improved releases. I will be tinkering with these two releases within VirtualBox for a while.
What a good thing it is to have a title ‘ubuntu’ that epitomises the highest and the best in ourselves reaching out to the highest and best in others. Certainly helps to remember that before the slide into ‘this distro sucks’ negativity takes hold. Politics are deadly. Buddha had all the ‘this distro sucks’ mentality summed up when he said that his enemies can never defeat Buddhism, only his disciples could do that!
perhaps an amended quote…”Microsoft will never defeat the open source movement. Only the open source movement is capable of that”…can be placed on stickers as well!