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When I first sat down with Jolla in September of last year, I was talking to CEO Jussi Hurmola. A month later, Hurmola was out, moving to a strategic role around Sailfish, Jolla’s open-source, MeeGo-derived OS. He was replaced by Marc Dillon, who went on to lead the official unveiling of Sailfish OS.

As of Monday, Dillon will be Jolla’s new head of software development (a role he was already carrying out, anyway). The new CEO, Tomi Pienimäki, was previously CTO then CIO at Itella Corporation, a Finnish logistics outfit.

At first glance, it looks like Jolla has opted to go for a more business-centric leader – Dillon is quite a developer evangelist type – now that it’s signed serious deals with the likes of Chinese handset distributor D.Phone and Finnish carrier DNA, and is preparing to reveal its handset later this month.

Here’s what Pienimäki said in a statement on Friday:

“Jolla is a great company with an exciting and promising future. I truly believe we can make a difference and bring something unique to the consumers. My task is to listen very closely to our customers and further build the collaboration network. I also want to ensure that our team can fully concentrate on the most important task: bringing the first device to the market this year.”

Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio thanked Dillon for his “inspirational leadership in the CEO role during the past months” and Dillon himself said he was excited to “be able to give 100 percent attention to what I love – working on the product with the Jolla team.”

Interestingly, Jolla also noted that it has Ari Jaaksi on its board. Jaaksi was the head of the doomed MeeGo project at Nokia before jumping ship to lead HP’s doomed WebOS team. Hopefully he can break with tradition this time.

Hong Kong telecoms and mining giant China Fortune, which has a 6.25 percent stake in Jolla, also has a representative on the board in the shape of Steve Lau, while other board members include private investors’ representative Mohamed Boukerche and Stefano Mosconi, Jolla co-founder and CTO.

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Now Shuttleworth, who used tens of millions of his own dollars to fund Canonical and made it his ambition to entrench Ubuntu Linux on desktops and servers is now launching a full-on assault to put it on your smartphone, your tablet and the computers that run your favorite cloud services via OpenStack.

Taking on the giants

It’s a gutsy bet. He’s basically taking on Google’s Chrome Browser, ChromeOS and Android OS. And then there’s iOS. Not a job for the faint of heart. In a recent interview with GigaOM,  Shuttleworth said a key Ubuntu advantage is that its basic code really does run everywhere from itty-bitty mobile devices to big iron. No Android-Chrome OS divide here.

“The core of Ubuntu that runs on the server is the same as on the phone and that’s a wonderful resonance,” Shuttleworth said. “We’ve done  pioneering work to put server Linux on ARM chips and the core of those ARM chips is the same for servers as it is for smartphones,”  Shuttleworth said.

Admittedly, it’s still early days for running ARM servers in a production environment — my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported that Baidu is doing it — for storage — but few others are. But the need for energy-sipping servers is not going away. And ARM servers address that demand.

As more cloud services get delivered via smartphones and tablets, all that “resonance” could come in handy. But timing may be a problem. Android and Apple iOS, which dominate that smartphone and tablet market now, will be hard to dislodge. If you believe Google Chairman Eric Schmidt — a biased observer — Android Android’s growth rate is, is on track to hit 1 billion downloads within the next 6 to 9 months. And, to further complicate matters, Microsoft seems willing to spend big to build its presence in smartphones and tablets as well. As much money as Shuttleworth has, Microsoft has more.

Seemingly undaunted, Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is getting serious looks from silicon providers, from carriers and from handset makers who are interested in offering it on their devices. He declined to provide names. It is true that Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile assets still worries third-party handset makers who don’t relish the thought of competing with their OS provider, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed Android adoption.

Ubuntu shows strength in cloud

Ubuntu is already a big presence in the cloud by virtue of Amazon Web Services where it is the most popular operating environment on EC2 — at least as measured by the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that people create. “The number of AMIs running Ubuntu is 5 or 6 times as many as Windows or any other operating system,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with Redmonk. One caveat is that people create lots of AMIs that they may not actually use, cautioned The 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks.

And Ubuntu came earlier than many other vendors to the OpenStack party. It’s got a leg up in the enterprise two years ago when  HP named it the lead host and guest OS in HP’s OpenStack cloud. That relationship continues to this day.

Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu’s OpenStack gets tons of interest from telcos and carriers that are rushing to create their own cloud services to better compete with AWS. One theme coming out of the OpenStack Summit last month was that these sleeping giants, many of which offer VMware vCloud Director options that price them out of the market, are finally waking up to the threat that AWS poses to them. And that is something Shuttleworth feels Ubuntu, with Canonical behind it,  can capitalize on.

“We are in a very good position when carriers want to look beyond standing up OpenStack to what the end-user experience is,” he said.

In his view, Ubuntu more than other Linux OpenStack flavors, offers simplicity and power — a claim that other OpenStack players would likely dispute. Linux rivals Red Hat, SUSE and are also all in the mix here. And Nebula’s selling point is its OpenStack controller that makes it easy to plug OpenStack into existing legacy environments. There will be a ton of competition among the OpenStack providers even as they all contend with CloudStack and Eucalyptus options.

Shuttleworth maintains Ubuntu’s advantage, however.

“We really are at the point where you can take a USB with Ubuntu, stick it on 1 to 300 servers and in a short period have a high-availability cloud — compute, storage, and network — up and running that provides a lot of value,” he said. “This is real and it’s helping people get over the conceptual hurdle of moving to cloud. It’s at the point where you can have ten people debating it for a week or you can just go and do it — the cost is low enough and the lessons are valuable enough to make it happen.”

But what about revenue?

There’s one not-so-small hitch here. As many good reviews as Ubuntu Linux has gotten, the revenue or profit picture is about as clear as mud. Canonical’s business model is that customers pay for support and maintenance on free software. But the privately held company won’t say how many people actually pay for any of that. And it doesn’t talk about how much money Shuttleworth has ponied up since founding the company in 2004. The question is whether Canonical (and Ubuntu) could stand on its own without his deep pockets. Face it, it’s hard to take a customer from free to non-free.

When it comes to questions about revenue or profitability, Canonical will only say that customers including PC, phone and tablet manufacturers and big companies that deploy Ubuntu at scale  use Canonical’s paid tools and services to support their server, cloud and client environments.

That may not be enough detail for enterprise buyers who want to know if the vendor they use today will be around next year or the year after. For a company that has such grand plans for a free operating system, Canonical needs to address these questions at some point.

Shuttleworth will be talking about his grand cloud vision at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in London in September, so here’s your chance to ask.

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Jolla, which is led by ex-Nokians, has taken the abandoned MeeGo OS and wrangled it into a new, slicker version called Sailfish. The Linux-based OS will in theory be available for a number of device types, but the first commercially-available version will be on a smartphone sold through the Chinese distributor D.Phone and the Finnish carrier DNA.

According to a separate tweet a few days ago, the timescale for that release is looking a bit fuzzy:

@jpetrise @nmshenoy @ashnazir Product shipping in 2nd half of year, announcement will happen closer to shipping.

— Jolla (@JollaHQ) April 1, 2013

One significant partnership announced at Helsinki’s Slush Festival last November will already be in trouble, namely that with ST-Ericsson – a chipmaker that is in the process of being broken up by parent companies STMicro and Ericsson.

Sailfish will certainly find itself in choppy waters this year. There are a range of factors that threaten the iOS-Android duopoly, from Windows Phone and BlackBerry to newer players such as Firefox OS — and let’s not forget Nokia’s low-end Asha platform, which will likely compete in the same market as Sailfish and Firefox OS, and Facebook Home, whose effect on the smartphone scene is yet to be felt.

Jolla will have a tough time establishing itself, but at least developers can really sink their teeth into its native app potential (they can also submit Android, HTML5 and Qt apps) now that they have the SDK.

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So far, I’ve found two minor issues with this set up. One: I can’t yet get a game controller working with the Linux on the Pixel. Second, games running at full screen get a little choppy. I don’t think that’s completely related to the hardware; instead, I suspect that the video drivers being used aren’t optimized for the Pixel’s 2560 x 1700 display.

Other than that, the only limit is the number of Linux games you can find on Steam. There are certainly fewer for Linux than for the Windows or Mac platforms, but there are enough titles for occasional gaming on the Pixel. I’m not suggesting that the Pixel with Linux will provide a vast, rich gaming experience, of course. However, this does add a little more value to the $1,449 I spent on “just a browser.”

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According to Fusion-io, the deal will leave safe the open-source distribution of SCST. On the other hand, ID7 makes its money off helping those other hardware vendors implement SCST in their commercial products, so in that sense Fusion-io just bought its way closer to the center of the software-defined storage universe.

Here’s what Fusion-io product chief Gary Orenstein had to say in a statement on Monday:

“As with other kernel contributors across the Linux stack working at Fusion-io, we will continue to support the open philosophies that have made ID7 and SCST successful. In addition to maintaining an open source version of SCST, Fusion-io will continue to contribute to the open source distribution as we develop software solutions to help define the all-flash data center.”

Software-defined storage, where storage is abstracted in much the same way as has been done with servers, is a lucrative scene right now. Just in recent months, we’ve reported on major investments for players such as SwiftStack, ScaleIO, Convergent.io, Nutanix and Jeda Networks.

The supposed benefit of the software-defined storage approach is the ability to weave shared storage pools out of standard server-attached hardware, so usage can be quickly scaled up and down as needed. ID7 has already been working with Fusion-io on its ION Data Accelerator software, which does this in an interface-agnostic fashion, and will indeed be folded into this side of Fusion-io’s business.

Again from the statement, here’s ID7 co-founder Mark Klarzynski:

“We had an opportunity to work with Fusion-io on the development of the ION Data Accelerator when it became apparent that the team has been founded on a culture of architecting software innovation deep within the Linux operating system kernel to deliver significant breakthroughs in modern storage architectures. We’re excited to join the Fusion-io team of world class engineers and developers to work together on open, software defined solutions to today’s most challenging data demands.”

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While there has been a Node.js download available for RHEL and its cousins Fedora and CentOS via the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), there was no formal support from Red Hat or Joyent (the company behind Node.js) and Node.js itself is not included in the Red Hat distribution. Besides Red Hat/CentOS release 6.3, Strongloop Node also supports:

• Debian/Ubuntu 12.10 (DEB)
• Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 (PKG)
• Microsoft Windows 7 (MSI)

The official support and service that Strongloop provides could be critical for RHEL developers who want to make use of Node.js’ event-driven talents. Now if a RHEL developer has an issue or problem with Node.js he or she has to go to the mailing list for help. “Now they can get support from us and we write Node.js,” Tsang told me.

As Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman once told GigaOM, Node.js is a very good way to write high-performance servers that need to handle APIs and facilitate very fast data ingress and egress. Those are attributes that might come in handy for enterprise developers.

Strongloop’s news comes the same day Node.js v. 10.0 debuted.

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As I noted last week, the Pixel has more flexibility than you might think because there are a number of ways to run Linux on the laptop. I opted to install and use crouton, a set of scripts that set up the Pixel to run Chrome OS and Linux at the same time. Here’s how it looks and works after the setup; you can get the crouton setup steps at this link so I don’t show those on camera:

The one-time setup was simple and now all I need to get Linux up and running is a quick set of commands in a terminal. Then it’s just a matter of switching between Chrome OS and Linux as needed. You can see in the video that the same app I use on a Mac for my weekly podcast, Audacity, runs just fine so I’ve got the podcast issue licked. And I’m going to test some video apps for occasional use as well.

Oh, and if you want to run Skype on the Pixel, you can do that to with this method: Check out how I stay on a video call while switching back to Chrome OS to check something on the web!

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