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Good article that tries to explain how Canonical is changing direction, and what that will mean for Linux.  The explanation looks at a brief list of Canonical partnerships that the author believes are key to the new direction.  Interesting stuff, but you have to follow the partnership links to grasp the impact :(

I tracked the WaveMaker link and foud that they have been acquired by VMware, and will join the SpringSource - Spring Framework for Java division. Interesting stuff. Rod Johnson has a new toy! (http://bit.ly/t9bX2m) Also, i noticed that VMware has decided to open source WaveMaker entirely - available for free. This is interesting in the context of changes at Ubuntu. Perhaps WaveMaker is a Java IDE challenge to QT's dominance on Linux? QT is owned by Nokia. And Nokia has slid under the boot heel of Microsoft and the Windows 8 platform of cloud-desktop-mobile. WaveMaker Springs To VMware http://bit.ly/s80t8n Perhaps more interesting is that Canonical Ubuntu would be supporting the VMware Cloud Application Platform. http://bit.ly/suN5ic Looks like VMware is very serious about a sweeping and comprehensive Cloud Productivity Platform. Neither Amazon or RackSpace have developer tools wired in like VMWare. Google Cloud has core Apps that can't be beat. FaceBook just purchased Strobe, but that focus is on mobility app developers - not business systems developers.

Note to Jason Harrop: VMware needs your docx desktop-cloud conversion.

Nice article from Matt Asay, who is now the COO at Canonical, the company behind Linux Ubuntu and Google's Chrome OS. excerpt:  As ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn remarks, "Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process." In Android land, this means making it easy for device manufacturers and wireless telecoms to evaluate, develop on, and ship Android-based devices. And ship them they are, to the tune of 60,000 Android devices per day. As Wired noted after the recent Mobile World Congress: This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google's operating system debuted here two years ago....This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines. There is one key distinction, though: Android is open source. It makes all the difference.

First, what is a "cloud OS" and why should I want one? Actually, I don't even know if anyone calls it a "cloud OS", but I couldn't find a better generic term for something like ChromeOS. The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet, which is has been renamed "The Cloud" since that sounds cooler, and your laptop or whatever is basically just a window into that cloud. If your laptop is stolen or catches fire or something, it's not a big deal, because you can just buy another one and nothing has been lost (except your money). Many people characterize this approach as using a "dumb terminal", but that's wrong. Your local computer can still do all kinds of smart computation and data manipulation -- it's just no longer the single point of failure. To me, the defining characteristic of cloud based apps is "information without location". For example, in the bad old days, you would install a copy Outlook or other email software on your PC, it would download all of your email to your computer, and then the email would live on that computer until Outlook corrupted its PST file and everything was lost. If you accidentally left your computer at home, or it was stolen, then you simply couldn't get to your email. Information behaved much like a physical object -- it was always in one place. That's an unnecessary and annoying limitation. By moving my email into "the cloud", I can escape the limitations of physical location and am able to reach it from any number of computers, phones, televisions, or whatever else connects to the Internet. For performance and coverage reasons, those devices will usually cache some of my email, but the canonical version always lives online. The Gmail client on Android phones provides a great example of this. It stores copies of recent messages so that I can access them even when there is no Internet access, and also saves any recent changes (such as new messages or changes to read state), but as soon as possible it sends those chang