Q: So do you think that Ubuntu, and maybe another player such as Linspire, will have to eventually team up with Microsoft to avoid any conflicts?

A:  We would never pay a patent license fee to Microsoft, because we don’t believe that there are any patent issues, and our economic model is essentially to make the software freely available. And if you are making the software freely available, you can’t obviously pay a patent license to somebody else for a copy of the particular version. So while Novell may feel that they can do a deal like that, Ubuntu would absolutely never do it.

I think obviously we will be leading the charge in terms of showing the weak points in Microsoft’s assertion.[I]t also means that we will be able to represent at least a threat to Microsoft because not only we will be competing for an end product but we will also be competing with their way of doing business [because] we have a different economic model, fundamentally different from theirs. There is no per-seat license fee.If they call they can negotiate with us in the same terms that they would negotiate with someone like Novell.

Q:You said it has been a big year for Ubuntu. Why do you say that, what are some of the milestones that you have reached?

A:Couple of milestones, this is the year that we put out our first release in enterprise.We still have a reputation over the last of two years of focusing very heavily on the desktop so that made us a very popular version of Linux for people who are Linux power users. We have grown to the point where those power users were starting to say ‘I would really like to start using Ubuntu on my servers at the company where I work. But in order to do that, you need to provide support for a much longer period of time and so this is the year that we put out our first enterprise quality release.

Also, that was the year where we formed a couple of very significant partnerships and alliances. Our relationship with Sun was very significant; for Sun Microsystems, it was a pragmatic way to embrace Linux.They had some very interesting new hardware technology in the form of a massively multi-core chip. The Sun guys are coming up with processors that have six to nine cores. So they wanted to be able to take advantage of that hardware in the Linux base, and we were able to work with them on that.

Q:What about growth in adoption rates, any kind of numbers that you can give me?

A:We know now that there are probably at least 8 million [Ubuntu] users.

Q:Do you think 2007 is the year of Linux on the desktop?

A:It’s been the next year for the last five or six. I certainly think that we are seeing an acceleration in interest in the open source community solving desktop type problems.If you’re back five years or six years, the people writing the core software in Linux were all people who were responsible for service [Now] we are seeing a real shift in that the opens source community themselves suddenly want to solve the desktop problems.They want to show that innovation in free software on the desktop really can demonstrate exciting ideas that people expect from their Windows or their Mac.

Microsoft and others, a lot of them say that free software and open source is all about copying what was being done before in proprietary software, and for a lot of time that was true.The world we are seeing is that, as soon as the free software reaches a point where it’s as good as the proprietary software, suddenly all the innovation shifts to the free software. Original innovation, and we saw that for [browsers] where once the Firefox had reached the level of parity with Internet Explorer, suddenly it became this hotbed of innovation, and now it’s Microsoft that’s scrambling to catch up with the free software browser.

Now, what may happen in 2007 is that we suddenly feel desktops being very hot ground for innovation, and new ideas, desktop style ideas, coming through in Linux suddenly made the proprietary software guys feel like they have to catch up. Which is different of course [from] saying that 2007 will be a year when all suddenly really want to switch to Linux, but it could well be the year when suddenly Linux starts to pull ahead in terms of innovation with the pace of developments in change.

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