You can practically set your watch by Canonical's release schedule for the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Every six months, the organization releases a major upgrade. While open source developers are constantly tweaking and improving Ubuntu, these major releases typically include better hardware support, new software, and the latest kernel and desktop environment updates.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth says the team is now going a bit further. Not only will Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04 be released at regular intervals, but Canonical will be releasing point upgrades for Ubuntu 8.04 every three months. Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron gets this special treatment because it's an LTS or Long Term Support release. That means Ubuntu 10.04, which will be released in April, 2010, will get the same kind of support.

Shuttleworth does suggest that he'd be willing to throw out the release schedule (or at least amend it a teensy weensy bit) if another major Linux distributor like Red Hat, Novel, or Debian were willing to collaborate on a coordinated release.

For our part, we'd like to see Apple and Microsoft enter into that agreement. If there was a new version of Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu out every 6 months, or even every 2 years, consumers would always have the option of picking among the latest, and most up to date operating systems, whether free and open source or commercial and closed source. Not that this will ever happen, but sometimes it's nice to dream.