I’ve also willingly subjected myself to this draconian interview process once and what I gathered from one of the engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on and still very much antagonizing.

Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.

I wouldn't call that joke antagonizing particularly, though? Or do you mean something separate?

It's certainly antagonizing to me, but maybe that's just because I work for the government and like to think that I do extraordinary work.

Hey, don't worry. Everyone who pays taxes works for the government :-)

More like investors... or subscription customers. But not employees.

I think your metaphor is going in the wrong direction! Customers and investors have a choice. We pay the government or we get locked in a box we helped pay for (-:

Analogy still holds. Democracy ostensibly allows choice. If you have no choice, it’s no different than a monopoly.

Depends on how you take it. I worked for the government during the Bush administration, but not in the administrative staff itself. It's just a shitty and unnecessary jab that rubs me entirely the wrong way.

Well, yes, it was a shitty and unnecessary jab. Sorry for that. But really, it was a jab at the GW Bush White House administration, not the civil service. I grew up a great fan of the US and Bush-Iraq felt like something important in the world had died. It felt like stupidity on a generational scale, that would have terrible consequences for the US. And that was before the torture.

Yeah I don't see working Canonical as an obvious target for the most ambitious, but there's nothing wrong with him having aspired to that at some point. The dig agaisnt the government is completely reasonable. Also somehow ironic because nobody has more hoops to jump through as an employer than the government.

Over much of the 2000s, it's fair to say that Shuttleworth/Canonical had pretty grand ambitions. They're still around--which is a not inconsiderable achievement in its own right--but in an era where the cloud providers have their own Linux flavors and other distros have generally leveled the usability playing field, Ubuntu just never really broke out.

Eh, a year ago I interviewed at a startup that has since died. I was on round 8 when I bailed. SaaS has imported the bureaucratic mindset of the universities that cranked out all these founders.