Ubuntu 12.04 - Pecuniary Parrakets - the future is dark and littered with Ads

NOTE: This is not a “real” and “researched” news and is a collection of random thoughts and impressions after using Ubuntu 10.10. I’ve been copping some flack for this article, but ultimately this was not meant to offend anyone and was written with some humour intended.

With the recent launch of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, I can’t help noticing a bunch of new commercial features “embedded” into this Linux OS. In this release, Ubuntu brought with it the Ubuntu music store which allows users to buy music and the AppCenter store that allows the users to purchase applications. Previously on 9.04, they introduced UbuntuOne which is a commercial cloud based storage service allowing you to sync your files with some complimentary free space.

Next natural step is Ads! Here’s why and how…

Ads only make money when a person clicks on it, leading to a purchase whether a product or a service. In order to effectively target a unique user and show them the ads of interest to that user, the ad provider needs to know details about this user. Essentially this is what Facebook and Google having been doing over the past few years and harvesting information of users linked to unique accounts which are required to use certain free and ad supported services.

Nonetheless, all the biggest web companies survived on or are involved with generating ad revenues, think Apple’s iAds and even Microsoft’s adCenter.

Imagine an ad supported OS with the ads appearing unobtrusively on the desktop. If it is linked to a file indexer daemon like Spotlight or Google Desktop Search, advertisers can now target the user based on they personal file content!

Goobuntu sure sounds nicer than ChromeOS, especially when Internet access is still not as widespread or as fast as it should be for efficient and effective cloud based thin clients. This you gotta blame the greedy telcos.

Oh wait… we forgot that’s why we have AndroidOS tightly knitted to our Google accounts.

Well, most of us have enjoyed Ubuntu for quite a while now without paying a cent. Mr Shuttleworth will probably need to top up his bank account in order to finance more interesting ventures like space trips, after all no business can run forever without some form of profit. Converting to a completely paid model has not proven super profitable with examples like SuSE and Redhat although they do make more than enough. Problem is most users will just jump over to the next free distro (CentOS, Debian?).