Canonical, the company behind popular Linux distro Ubuntu has announced that Matt Assay joined the team as Chief Operating Officer (COO). Matt Assay – an open source industry veteran who has been involved with open source for more than 10 years – will be responsible for “aligning strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”
According to Canonical’s current CEO, Jane Silber, bringing in a leading open source business strategist like Assay was imperative. “As more companies and people are embracing Ubuntu for their day-to-day computing, we felt it critical to bring in a person who knew not just open source, but has a long experience in making Linux relevant to businesses and users alike. We think Matt brings to Canonical the perfect blend of industry, executive and community savvy,” says Jane Silber, soon to be CEO of Canonical.
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In related Ubuntu news, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx will be released this April. Canonical recently announced that it made an important change – the default search provider in Firefox, Google, will be replaced by Yahoo!. This change occurred because Canonical and Yahoo! negotiated a revenue sharing deal which “will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform.” The user is of course free to change the search provider back to Google – or to any other search engine for that matter.
It should be said though that Yahoo! is not behind Yahoo! search. Redmond-based software giant Microsoft is behind Yahoo! Search. This summer the two companies struck this deal: for the next 10 years Yahoo! Search will be powered by Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” (decision engine because it helps you take decisions). For the next decade Microsoft is granted exclusive access to Yahoo!’s search technologies – which Microsoft will lose only of it is not a proper competitor to Google Search.
Canonical, the company behind popular Linux distro Ubuntu has announced that Matt Assay joined the team as Chief Operating Officer (COO). Matt Assay – an open source industry veteran who has been involved with open source for more than 10 years – will be responsible for “aligning strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”