By Bruce Byfield (Datamation)
As the Ubuntu team would undoubtedly be the first to admit, some of the credit that Hardy Heron is receiving is not due to any action on its part beyond the wish to package the latest free software...
The main place where innovation is happening rapidly seems to be in Ubuntu's efforts to balance the concept of free software with the drive toward commercialism by Canonical, Ubuntu's face in business...
Ubuntu, like any of dozens of other distributions, has been ready for the desktop for some years. Hardy Heron simply makes it incrementally more so, while still not resolving the essentially unresolvable debate of how to make free and proprietary elements co-exist. It's a debate that is far from unique to Ubuntu, but one whose ambiguities seem to be stronger with every release of that distribution.