Is Mark Shuttelworth becoming the next Steve Jobs?

Today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) , the founder of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu Unity Interface would be the default interface on Ubuntu 11.04. The Unity interface was developed by Canonical , the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu for the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10.

It is unclear how the main man of Ubuntu decided to zero-in on this idea as the Unity interface has been severely criticized for being slow and unresponsive. Recently OEMs like System 76 has refused to launch their netbook line with Ubuntu netbook 10.10 because the sluggish performance. They said they would wait for one more release to let Unity mature.

Few bloggers have pointed out that Canonical and Ubuntu are slowly trying to phase out stock Gnome packages from the main Ubuntu build , hence such a decision.  Even some more people  feel  that ‘this is Canonical’s attempt to fully own the copyright to the Ubuntu interface‘ .

‘Gaining control’ of a Linux distribution by the parent company has not been a heard of in the recent past although, Mark Shuttleworth had in the past expressed his disappointment clearly saying it is good to leave the decision to  the design team when users criticized some of the design changes in Ubuntu 10.04 . He said “No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions”

It is well-known that Ubuntu is very inspired by Apple – left hand side window buttons, Global Menu in Netbook edition, trying to match-up to Mac OS X in design. And now perhaps Shuttlworth is trying to emulate Jobs and be dictator too!!

So what’s next? UbuPhone and UbuPad and a series of lawsuits??

Would love your views.