--Christian Einfeldt

THE chief operating officer (COO) of Canonical, Jane Silber, recently became the company's CEO, replacing Mark Shuttleworth. Coming in to fill Silber's COO gap is Matt Asay, as announced by Canonical and by Asay himself.

After more than four years at Alfresco, I have joined Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, as its chief operating officer.

“I'd estimate that the Yahell deal nets them at least a few hundred thousand dollars over the course of a year.”
      --RyanUbuntu had a relatively weak last release (Fedora, for an opposite example, did well in the sense that reviews got better, not worse). Even this detailed review from a couple of days ago confirmed this. More recently, Canonical's decision to send search requests to Microsoft's Bong [sic] led to some controversy that we covered in [1, 2].

Well, we are somewhat saddened to see that Asay is perhaps trying to justify the company's new policy by making a new post about "the importance of Bing". Therein he writes: "It's not about loving Microsoft. It's about preserving options...and competition."

This does not defend competition because it promotes a serial offender -- a company that we already know manipulates its search results to advance its lies and business interests (and put competitors in positions of disadvantage). Asay will hopefully not defend Mono (.NET), which is about making Microsoft stronger (and making Novell, his former employer, stronger). It's not "about preserving options...and competition."

Microsoft is the antithesis of options and competition. Everyone knows that.

Jokingly, our reader Ryan twisted the above quote to say: "It's not about loving Microsoft, it's about loving their money and selling out our users." He went on to describe it as "Inferior search engine but it makes Canonical some $$$'s. Ubuntu probably has several million users. I'd estimate that the Yahell deal nets them at least a few hundred thousand dollars over the course of a year. That money comes at the direct cost to Mozilla and detracts from Firefox development, so now Ubuntu is worse than a passive consumer of FOSS, they are another parasite. Well, Mandriva defaults to Ask, but I seriously doubt anyone keeps that. Yahoo might be passable enough to keep users content with it."

MinceR called it "ridiculous" and stated: "apparently Canonical's leaders have decided it would be fun for them to turn into another Novell"

That's just too big a leap, which I disagree with. Novell is very different because it directly harms its competitors by legitimising software patents and using them to trash other vendors.

By the way, Asay comes from Alfresco, which is competing against Google, not just Microsoft SharePoint that Novell helps promote under the guise of "interoperability".

According to the Var Guy (from last week), Google is trying to win disgruntled SharePoint users at the expense of Alfresco. Might this also explain Asay's fear of Google?

No doubt, Microsoft and Google are waging a software as a service (SaaS) war. But the latest shot fired comes from a surprising source: LTech, an enterprise cloud service provider, is helping customers automate document migrations from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Apps. Here’s how.