Well, I’m in Portland.

For those o you who’ve never been there, the old town is great, trolley-cars (trams in other parts of the world) are great, and in central downtown they’re free.

We’ve had a number of keynotes, from the likes of Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Marten Mickos (MySQL), Doug Fisher (Intel), and many others.

Of these, something Marten Mickos just said has stuck in my mind. It’s about innovation and the costs of innovation:

“I’ve don’t believe money can create innovation. I do believe that innovation can create money.” Marten was referring to keeping “frugality” on top of the list when considering innovation: just throwing money at R&D is not successful. True innovation is borne of a need to survive. He used SUN as a good example: while they were on top of the pile, they didn’t innovate. When the money almost ran out, they did some of their best work.

The same is of course true of early Microsoft work, done in the times of frugality, it was innovative. Now they buy the results of innovation elsewhere: Are they struggling internally to innovate dispite the huge amounts of money they spend?

I’m not sure. There is much that parties like Microsoft Research do that can easily be put into the innovative box. The issue I believe is more around vested interests.

Vested interests are the reason why Sony Entertainment and Sony Electronics; although owning both parts of the pie that Apple eventually ate; the content & the hardware; they just couldn’t get their differing vested interests aligned.

Similar issues surround the whole entertainment arena with their getting to grips (or not) with digital media.

So what’s the issue then with Linux? What are the vested interests currently undermining the future of it?

In the short term we’ll see. Ubuntu is and has been the most popular Linux distribution for the last few years. It’s so popular that some magazines are having difficulties keeping the coverage of ubuntu DOWN in order to keep their readers on-board.

The next few months will be key. As popularity and newsworthy events increase in the Ubuntu arena, we’ll see what vested interests other parts of the Linux community have. If they are smart, they’ll figure out how to combine the vested interests, nont use them to fight one another.

 from Portland, Oregon, USA,

Pauwl