SCALE 6x -- This place is packed

I got to SCALE 6x today just in time to hear Ubuntu's Jono Bacon deliver the keynote speech to a standing-room-only audience in the theater at the Los Angeles Airport Westin hotel.

The room was packed, with people bunched up in the back and along the sides.

His talk focused on the importance and purpose of community in the entire open-source world, not just the Ubuntu project. The point was that the community -- from developers all the way down to users -- will make some year (maybe not this year) "the year of the Linux desktop."

"The desktop is rubbish," he said. I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that, but he did say that keys to the implementation of open-source software on the desktop hinges on an effort that's "managed, reliable and sustained." As far as the "sustained" component goes, Bacon talked about the importance of "regular releases, predictible releases."

That's what Ubuntu is all about -- setting a six-month interval between releases, with those releases supported for a fixed length of time.

And when it comes to businesses, "they want reliability," Bacon said, but when it comes to the biggest part of the open-source world -- community -- the business world (and the rest of the computer-using world that isn't using open source right now) can't quite wrap their collective heads around it.

"Businesses don't understand community -- they just don't understand how it works," Bacon said. "It's so alien to them."

And open source breeds a different kind of community, Bacon said. "We're a community that builds stuff. It all boils down to us -- everybody has an impact."

But don't let it go to your head, Linux geeks. While open source in general, Linux in particular and Ubuntu in specific are certainly growing, open-source software has a 1.77-percent share of the market. Yes, it's almost doubled from the 1-percent share of previous years, but there are other ways to measure it, Bacon said.

"It really doesn't matter -- what's more important is 'mindshare.' You may not use it, but everybody's talking about it."

Bacon cited Google Trends, which keeps track of what people are searching for from year to year, showing how searches for the keyword Linux have gone down while those for the keyword Ubuntu have gone up. "We're feeling a change in mindshare toward distributions," he said.

"More and more people are talking about Ubuntu and Red Hat as opposed to just talking about Linux."

And the open-source community is vital to the success of the technogies it's producing, polishing and using.

"The community can make the year of the desktop happen -- everybody in this room can make a difference in how it works."

To that end, Bacon said that being a member of the community includes everything from filing bug reports (which can be followed by anybody, since they're as open as the software that produces them) to learning how to build packages and basically not being a big ol' jerk.

That led to the reasons for Ubuntu's Code of Conduct. "It basically boils down to 'be excellent to each other,' " Bacon said. And key to that excellence is inclusion, diversity and, again, making it so everybody feels they have an impact.