When Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth began shipping Ubuntu nine years ago, he created "Bug #1." Its title was "Microsoft has a majority market share," and Shuttleworth said "[t]his is a bug which Ubuntu and other projects are meant to fix."

Today, Shuttleworth has declared the bug "closed," but the bug wasn't fixed as a result of Ubuntu's popularity. It was fixed by the rise of iOS and Android. As for Ubuntu, Shuttleworth now says, "it's better for us to focus our intent on excellence in our own right rather than our impact on someone else's product."

Shuttleworth wrote:

Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables, and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition with iOS and Android representing a meaningful share. Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing. Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it's important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed.

It's no surprise to see one of the world's most prominent open source advocates talk glowingly of Android gaining on Windows in overall device usage. It is perhaps a bit more startling to see Shuttleworth speak of iOS as being a fix for Windows' market dominance, however. After all, iOS is a more closed platform than Windows. Canonical, meanwhile, is still falling short of the elusive goal of making more money than it spends.

Free software activist Bradley Kuhn wrote that "I'm not against the closing of this bug; however, the closed status should be something like 'Can't Fix.'" (The actual status is "fix released.") Kuhn went on to note that the original bug report stated that "[a] majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software," and that even Android devices tend to include proprietary software.

Shuttleworth declaring Bug #1 closed comes as Canonical moves into new areas beyond the desktop. The company is adapting Ubuntu to phones and tablets, and it has steadily built a respectable business offering server software and now cloud infrastructure software based on the open source OpenStack.

"It's worth noting that today, if you're into cloud computing, the Microsoft IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] team are both technically excellent and very focused on having ALL OS's including Linux guests like Ubuntu run extremely well on [Windows] Azure, making them a pleasure to work with," Shuttleworth also wrote in today's bug fix.

Which bug will Canonical tackle next? We suggest fixing Bug #461000: "General populace ignorance of Ubuntu."