Secret weapon
NOT many sports fans knew it, but the champion Boston Celtics had a secret battle cry—one that many Linux users already know. The word was “Ubuntu,” an African word that roughly translates to “I am because we are.”
To coach Doc Rivers, the philosophy behind the word was a way to unify his team and give its three superstars a way to focus on a common goal.
“The men in green chant Ubuntu in the locker room before games, wear it on practice T-shirts and wrist bands and refer to it when it really counts,” reports radio WBUR’s Martha Bebinger from Boston.
In Game 1 of the championship series, when star forward Paul Pierce was injured in the third quarter, Rivers called the rest of the team together and told them: “What did the guy from South Africa say about adversity, nothing can get you down. That’s why we play 12 guys, all right. Let’s beat this team.” They went on to beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 98-88.
“The guy from South Africa” is Bishop Desmond Tutu, who explains the concept this way: “In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual. I want you to be all you can be, because that’s the only way I can be all I can be.”
This is the same philosophy that drives Ubuntu, a popular version of the free Linux operating system sponsored by Canonical Ltd. and developed by a community of programmers and end-users. The software is free—and its users are encouraged to contribute to it in any way they can as a way of giving back to the community.
“Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘humanity to others,’ or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.’ The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world,” the Canonical Web site says.
On Ubuntu’s install CDs, former South African President Nelson Mandela adds: “Ubuntu does not mean that people should not address themselves. The question is, are you going to do so to enable the community around you?”
The philosophy seems to have worked for the operating system as well as the basketball team.
Ubuntu’s popularity has climbed steadily since it was released in 2004 and the founder, of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, estimates there were at least eight million Ubuntu users at the end of 2006. While this may seem small compared to Windows or Mac OS, remember that Canonical does not spend a fortune on advertising. There are no slick “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” commercials and no “The Wow Starts Now” campaigns. Canonical is not spending $500 million to advertise an operating system that nobody seems to want. Everyone who uses Ubuntu is doing so because another user recommended it.
Two years ago this month, I erased Windows XP from my home PC and installed Ubuntu on it and have not looked back since. Today, the Linux-based system I have is more secure, more efficient in its use of resources—and more fun to use— than any Windows-based installation on comparable hardware. It certainly blows Windows Vista out of the water. Remarkably, it’s also 100 percent legal and 100 percent free, which is something you could never say about Windows, whether you used a licensed version or a pirated knock-off.
Of course, the switch to Linux was not painless.
Though setting it up was much easier than I thought it would be, there were a number of annoyances or frustrating problems along the way. An old scanner that wouldn’t work with Linux or problems playing Flash-based videos. In each of these instances, the Ubuntu community kept me from throwing in the towel.
The Ubuntu forums, in particular, were extremely helpful in solving problems as they cropped up. If I experienced a bug, it was likely that somebody else had too, and reported it on one of the forums. Better yet, somebody else had probably found a fix and shared it with everybody else.
Under this system of sharing information, even reporting a bug—and carefully documenting how it can be reproduced—is a way of contributing. In this way, flaws can be more quickly identified and fixed. This improves the operating system and benefits everyone.
Forums, of course, are not new, but the Ubuntu community is a standout because experienced users are genuinely helpful and very patient with newcomers. If you’ve been around mailing lists, you’ll know this isn’t always the case. It must be the spirit of Ubuntu at work.