From the 'everyone's favorite cosmonaut' files:

PORTLAND. The quest for the Linux desktop is not a 'mad crusade' - so says
Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth who just finished up a rousing philosophical discussion on the art and science of Free Software Engineering.

The gist of his talk and the part that got the audience engaged in an impromptu round of applause mid-speech was the following statement:.

'As a final challenge the great task in front of us in the next 2 years is to lift up the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty to something that is art, " Shuttleworth said.

Canonical has got a whole plan for making that happen and it all starts with the fundamentals of process and by enabling more transparency and open collaboration.

Overall Shuttleworth's talk included the humorous, the inspiring and the pipe dream too (with his idea of a synchronized plan for open source releases). No question Mark Shuttleworth is a rock star in the open source world and the OSCON 08 conference is his playground. Anyways that's my first .02 take after a long day (who starts keynotes at 7:30 PM anyways?), we'll have a full writeup on the Shuttleworth keynote on the main InternetNews.com site in the AM.