Jane Silber has been chief executive of Canonical for 11 days.
But she’s no outsider swooping in to take over Ubuntu Linux’s corporate sponsor. She joined Canonical in June 2004, two months after previous CEO Mark Shuttleworth founded the company with a few programmers he recruited from the Debian Linux project on which Ubuntu is based.
Since then Canonical has grown to about 320 employees and has made Ubuntu a major presence in the world of Linux–version 10.04, one of the important “long-term support” versions that arrives every two years, is due in April. It’s an unusually sustained effort to make Linux a force on desktop and laptop computers, and among Canonical’s accomplishments is a mainstream foothold on Dell PCs.