“The uptake of Ubuntu in India is tremendous”

Gone are the days when Ubuntu was a name for the tech niche in India. With state governments like Uttar Pradesh and Assam distributing Ubuntu-based laptops to their students, Ubuntu has gained popularity amongst the commoners in the country. 2013 saw Ubun

—Daniel Holbach, Ubuntu community leader

Q What do you do with Ubuntu and what is your role at Canonical?

I got involved in the Ubuntu community in its very early days and helped out as a contributor in maintaining parts of the Ubuntu platform. When I got hired by Canonical, I worked in what was back then a much smaller Desktop team, and coordinated some parts of the development community.

As Ubuntu became more successful and Canonical became bigger, Jono Bacon became the community manager for Ubuntu and started leading a team of community coordinators. Up until today, I’m still very happy in the team and have taken on a variety of tasks, such as working with the developer community to make it even easier to improve Ubuntu.

Nowadays, our focus is on bringing Ubuntu to many different form-factors, such as phones, tablets, TVs and others; so our team is supporting many new initiatives surrounding this effort. As part of this, I have also worked as a project manager for the Ubuntu Software Store, which is now available for Ubuntu on phones and tablets.

Q The Ubuntu Community has evolved and is vibrant. What are the areas for improvement that you see for this community?

The people in the Ubuntu community are fantastic to work with. I have learned a lot here, and it has been a privilege to see it grow from its very start to where it is now. Country teams sprung up in most places across the world (including India), and brought many wonderful and capable people to Ubuntu. Although my primary interest always was the development community, we’ve had thousands of individuals working in