This just in: Matt Asay leaves Ubuntu parent company Canonical

By Steven Rosenberg on December 8, 2010 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

I wondered why my formerly favorite open-source-focused blogger Matt Asay has been so ... silent lately. He became Canonical's COO not so long ago, his Cnet blog went into hibernation, his personal blog not so much (but not exactly bursting with activity, either), and he didn't exactly cut a large profile media-attention-wise at Canonical.

Now I hear from Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols (and via Matt's own blog and Canonical's blog) that Matt is leaving the comparatively huge (400-or-so-employee) Canonical — the company behind the wildly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution and associated services — for HTML5-web-app startup Strobe.

Allow me to present a three-paragraph chunk from the Canonical blog entry that Matt wrote in announcing this move:

What I love is to be knee-deep in customer issues. I love growing a business, customer reference by customer reference. I talked with Jane about getting more involved with the sales side of Canonical, but Canonical isn't a startup anymore. We have 400 people and significant revenue in each of our three business units. I worried that a focus on any particular business unit would leave me blind to the work going on in the other business units.
So when a close friend and VC approached me with an opportunity at Strobe, running sales and business development - and not just running them but actually doing them, getting dirty in the trenches - I was intrigued. Sealing the deal was the technical background of the founding team and the impressive apps being built with open-source SproutCore: having been so spoiled by great engineering talent at Canonical, I didn't want to leave for a minor league team.
It was the hardest decision of my career, even harder than my decision to leave Alfresco. I have never left an employer after such a short time, and everywhere I look within Canonical and the Ubuntu community I see massive opportunity. This is a leap of faith for me, but one that I feel sure is right for me, even as I continue to cheer on Canonical in its ambitious quest. I would love to remain active with Canonical in some fashion, but we'll have to see what Jane would like. She is the boss.

I can certainly see substantial triangulation between the open-source operating environment of Linux (including Ubuntu) as well as the open-source development community and whatever SproutCore turns out to be. There have been rumblings about the FOSS community needing to pay more attention to cloud-connected, IP-powered minimal desktop and mobile interfaces, and free software and open development in the mobile space are clearly on the table with Android and MeeGo.

So this could be the start of something very big. In case you are wondering (and I know you are), I'm not BFFs with Matt Asay. We exchanged comments here and there, and I certainly missed his take on the business of open source (and I hope he'll get back to it; working for Alfresco didn't silence him like his stint at Canonical did).