• Date: Tuesday 20th October 2009 at 18:30 (Tea/Coffee and biscuits from 17:45)
• Speaker: Matthew Barker, Corporate Services, Canonical Ltd
• Venue: The Met, King Street, Leeds, LS1 2HQ

Event hosted jointly by the British Computer Society – West Yorkshire Branch and Open Source Specialist Group.

As open-source software has grown in sophistication, it has quickly become a viable alternative to the major proprietary operating systems. This presentation will give an update on the current capabilities of open source along with an insight into future developments. Matthew will discuss the issues and myths around its use in commercial and public-sector organisations, whilst also providing pointers for personal use.

The talk will include:

• Overview of Ubuntu?
• Usage in the contexts of: Commercial-enterprise, Public Sector, Personal
• Open Source Applications
• Open Source Capabilities
• The road map

Matthew Barker joined Canonical in 2006, taking responsibility for the OEM channel in South Asia. Having successfully built partnerships with hardware manufacturers like HCL, Wipro and eSys, he moved into the Canonical Corporate Services Team in 2008 focussing on driving the adoption of Ubuntu in enterprise. He has overseen deployments with organisations like the NHS, York University and Handelsbanken. He has experience across all the significant vertical markets and of “the how and why” open source is being adopted.

Founded in late 2004, Canonical is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project with the  mission to help individuals and organisations take full advantage of open-source technologies by:

• Delivering the world’s best free-software platform
• Ensuring its availability to everyone
• Supporting it with high-quality professional service offerings
• Encouraging the continued growth and development of the free-software community

Canonical believes the open-source community creates better software. The community enables an increase development capacity many times over. Ubuntu is a community-developed and supported project. Since its launch in October 2004, Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Every six months the world’s best free and open-source software is selected, tested, brought together, and made freely available on common technology platforms.

Steve Brumby

Tags: Canonical, FOSS, Linux, Open Source, Ubuntu

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