Whether you believe the iPad hype or not, it’s clear that touchscreen devices represent an important emerging hardware niche. Canonical responded to that reality recently with the release of uTouch 1.0, a software stack designed to ensure solid multi-touch and gesture support on Ubuntu. Here are the details, along with some thoughts.
Apple certainly didn’t invent the touchscreen market (just like it didn’t invent the OS X kernel, or the Safari browser, or a lot of other software that it ripped off from open-source developers, but I digress…), which has existed for years. But the popularity of the iPad, combined with smaller mobile Internet devices and touchscreen-enabled laptops and tablets, has underscored the importance of this niche over the course of the last year.
Indeed, Gartner projected last April that fifty percent of computer users age 15 and younger will use touchscreen computers by 2015 (although it advances more conservative figures for the adoption of touchscreen devices in the enterprise). Similarly, another analysis estimated the touchscreen market to grow by 5000 percent in 2010, with exponential growth continuing in coming years.
Multi-Touch and Ubuntu
At first glance, the multi-touch revolution may not appear very significant for Ubuntu or the free-software world. So far, the most popular consumer touchscreen devices, like the iPad and Kindle, have been highly proprietary and poor candidates for running Linux (sure, geeks like this guy can make Ubuntu run on closed devices with enough hacking, but they haven’t gotten very far beyond booting the kernel). Where Linux has penetrated the touchscreen world, it has been mostly on cellphones in the form of Android, which has little in common with desktop-oriented distributions like Ubuntu.
But that’s likely to change as PC makers follow Apple in releasing “slate” devices designed for general productivity, and as touchscreens become standard fare on laptops and netbooks. The days when developers of desktop Linux can count on the keyboard and mouse being the chief input devices are numbered, making support for multi-touch hardware essential.
That’s why uTouch, which brings a comprehensive gesture-support API to Linux, makes sense. Hardware drivers for most touchscreen devices have existed for a while, but there was no easy way for application developers to take advantage of the power of multi-touch functionality.
uTouch, which will ship with Ubuntu 10.10 in October, helps to address this deficiency. As Canonical promises:
With Ubuntu 10.10 (the Maverick Meerkat), users and developers will have an end-to-end touch-screen framework — from the kernel all the way through to applications.
Canonical’s Contributions
It’s worth mentioning that Canonical’s sponsorship of the new multi-touch API should serve as a response to some of the criticism leveled against the company in recent weeks in the wake of a blog post charging Ubuntu with leeching off the work of other open-source projects.
It’s certainly true that a huge proportion of the code that constitutes Ubuntu is sponsored by organizations other than Canonical. It’s also true that some of the projects that Canonical does undwrite, like Ubuntu One and Launchpad, are proprietary or were for a long time.
In the case of uTouch, however, Canonical has contributed software vital to preserving the competitiveness of Linux as a desktop operating system. And since it’s released under the GPL, all members of the free-software ecosystem, whether they use Ubuntu or not, have the opportunity to benefit.
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Releasing a software in a free license is just one of the step towards working with upstream. Its easy to release a software for your own distribution and distro specific patches But that does not constitute working with upstream. There are already effort in X project, Gtk (and clutter) and in Qt aimed at bringing Multitouch support to the Linux UI interface. All this efforts would be of benefit to downstream distributions like Ubuntu especially the work from the X project. It would be nice if canonical works with this upstream projects from the very beginning so that this new awesome utouch thingie is not just a ubuntu specific tech but something which would be a part of the next gnome release because the work would be done from the very top. This is how the entire ecosystem works and benefits from each other.
And just as importantly…
Canonical’s insistence that contributors assign copyright to Canonical (a for-profit company) is going to be a very very big roadblock towards upstream adoption for this technology. Its going to lead to a fork of the libraries or a re-implementation and incompatibilities.
I can not stress how upstream hostile this copyright assignment policy is.
Read this:
http://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment
Canonical’s copyright assignment requirement is pretty much the opposite of best practises that GNOME as an upstream project has in place to ensure the health of its codebase. GNOME has gotten both Intel and Novell to drop copyright assignment policies in the past as part of incorporating their tech into the GNOME project directly or as external dependencies. To think that GNOME is going to choose to treat Canonical as a corporate for-profit entity differently is delusional.
Throwing code over the wall is not the same as contributing to upstream. Patching applications against libraries that you _know_ are unacceptable dependencies to upstream projects because of corporate copyright assignment policy is not contributing to upstream. Those patches are probably doomed to be rejected even if you go through the trouble of submitting them. Canonical _knows_ this and they _know_ the copyright assignment policy they require is a problem for upstream inclusion.
If Canonical really wants this technology adopted widely and wants upstream projects to depend on these libraries instead of reimplementing their own version of the tech..they will drop this copyright assignment policy and welcome external contributors(including those with competing business interests) on an equal footing.
-jef
@Jef
Yeah, it’s so sad to see Mark not learning this lesson.
they are happy to take other people’s contributions, but no so much to give back.
Sounds like Tribalism to me?
ian,
this is more important than cheap snarky comments about tribalism. Canonical’s management team which sets these policies is working in opposition to long term interests of users upstream developers and even Canonical’s own engineering staff. Canonical simply does not have the manpower to support technologies like this long term on their own and its in their best interest to get this functionality wedged into the commonly used upstream frameworks. The copyright assignment policy works directly against that. More people… more application writers…more Ubuntu users..need to tell Shuttleworth and the Canonical executive team forthrightly.
Reaching for easy punches like the tribalism comment you made only encourages them to ignore what you are saying. This isn’t a tit for tat discussion. Canonical’s management has expressed interest in working better with upstream in the last 6 months. Changing their copyright policy on Canonical initiated works is a very important part of that.
-jef
[...] its part, Canonical has been focused intensely on touch-enabled devices for a while, developing the uTouch 1.0 software stack and building plenty of touch-friendly features into the Unity desktop interface. Those endeavors [...]