Impi funded by Shuttleworth's HBD

The news of the day is that Mark Shuttleworth has invested R10m in local Linux distribution vendor ImpiLinux via his VC company. First off the mark with news was Tectonic last night, Business Day this morning, and the Sunday Times had an article this afternoon aimed at the more common folk.

In all, continuing the good news that the next Impi version will be based on Ubuntu. Maintaining your own distribution from scratch (including infrastructure such as package management), while brave, is not the best way to spend your time. Focusing on the local issues while gaining continuously over time from Ubuntu is a great plan.

I really hope Impi can learn a bit from Ubuntu, and make it easier to contribute to their project in terms of easily available source code, code repository, mailing lists with archives, public bug trackers, and so forth.

(And I can always hope that the horrid licensing page of theirs will go...)

While obviously Mark does fund local companies, it's good to see more South African Linux developers being given the chance to work in the industry full time. Becoming a geek of the sorts hired by Canonical unfortunately is part luck of birth and access to resources (the rest is motivation and creativity, which is where I fall down), and I'd like more geeks to be around to make those resources available locally.