Last Thursday while reviewing the debian-devel messages I found a message from Matt Zimmerman titled New Debian-based Company: Canonical Software where he announced that a number of DDs have been hired to work on a Derived Debian Distribution which fist release is codenamed The Warty Warthog.
I believe that those are great news and being interested in Custom and Derived Debian Distributions as I am, I sent a reply to the message asking about cooperation with Custom Debian Distributions. The good news is that they are interested in cooperate with the CDD project and in fact the company has hired some people that is already working on CDDs.
After learning about all this I got interested in the people behind the Company, Matt Zimmerman said in his message that Mark Shuttleworth gave a talk on the last Debconf related to this project, but unfortunately I was unable to attend and the content of the talk is not on-line (at least not on the Debconf website), but I assume he is the one behind the project.
Browsing the his website I've found a couple of interesting things; the first one is a note about how to manage free software projects when the people working on the is hired to do the work instead of working on it because they have personal interest on the project, but the project is not developed as a commercial project. I find it interesting and I suppose we can learn from this kind of experiences.
The other thing that has interested me is the project described in the note, the School Tool Project, a free software project that addresses one of the issues that we are not going to work on in our project (pobably because the schools of our community use a Windows program developed by the government to handle the school administration and it is not easy to replace it now). Anyway having a multi platform free alternative can be a very good thing for the (not so distant) future. Let's hope the project succeeds this time.
I suppose we will have more news about Canonical Software in the near future, I'm curious about which kind of services or products they are going to sell and, of course, about which DDs are working with them ... ;)
