The owner of Canonical, the parent firm of Ubuntu, offered to answer any questions I had about the project following the publication of an article about Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago. While he had no problem with most of that article, "on acouple of them (points which I made) you seemed to speculate and infer intentions on my behalf that I would be happy to answer for the record."

While Shuttleworth will keep funding Ubuntu until it reaches sustainability, he wants the project to reach a point where it does not depend on either him or any other person to pour in money. "Currently revenues that help underwrite Ubuntu come from support and professional services," he says.

Asked whether he agreed that Ubuntu had been marketed well, he gave a simple "Yes, indeed" in reply.

In my opinion, Ubuntu has filled a long-felt niche - a released version of Debian's unstable branch of development, one that has been tamed to some extent and is usable by most average punters. Shuttleworth refused to buy into my proposition that Ubuntu would not have been half as successful as it has been if the project had been based on some other distribution.

"Now that's pure speculation, it would be very difficult to answer with any sort of rationale other than personal preference for one platform over another," he said. "Since I became a Debian developer in 1996, I've a longstanding preference for that platform and it was a natural starting point for Ubuntu."

The diplomat in him then took over. "But there are many other excellent communities and distributions there, and perhaps several of them could have qualified. Anyhow, that is rather moot. Ubuntu is part of the Debian world and we try to have the best impact there that we can."