so that the Ubuntu blog has been knocked offline by traffic as we write (cache of post) – although Reg readers will have suspected something was coming. In an interview with us in February, Shuttleworth admitted that time was running short for the project, which he noted was already a year late.

Whale and carrots

Calling it his "white whale," Shuttleworth noted both the project's failings and his personal investment in the project. "I feel the team has earned a fair shot and I may take my carrots," he said – meaning that he would have do something he didn't want to because it was the healthy choice.

In that interview, he also reflected on the dream that was Unity: "Unity 8 delivers a unified set of experiences across all theview that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed alternatives available to manufacturers," Shuttleworth wrote in his post Wednesday. "I was wrong on both counts."

Despite noting that the Unity team had delivered a "beautiful, usable and solid" platform, he said he had to recognize the bigger reality. "I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear," he noted.

And if there was any doubt that the decision came as a blow to his dream of one Linux to bind them all, Shuttleworth wrote: "This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of