Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and CEO of Ubuntu, thinks the open source community needs a federated, decentralized system for tracking patches and bugs. In other words, he wants the open source world to collaborate on Linux security, among other, issues.

In fact, that was one of Shuttleworth’s key messages when he offered the keynote address at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit last week.

“It’s not about Red Hat versus Microsoft or open source fans versus the evil empire, any more than the Cold War was about the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. The conflict is really about ideas,” Shuttleworth told listeners, noting that the “enemy” — proprietary software vendors — has more financial resources than the open source community.

“To glue our pipeline together, we need tools,” he argued. “Collaboration is an easy term to say, but it’s hard to do. We often don’t know who to talk to upstream, so the question is, How can we make collaboration better?”

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Shuttleworth may have been singing to the choir. The Linux Foundation provides neutral collaboration forums so companies and individuals can work together to solve the challenges facing the Linux platform. Linux Foundation members, developers, independent software vendors, government organizations and end users are invited to collaborate and speak out on collaborative issues, challenges and solutions.

Still, if that choir was humming security collaboration tunes in unison, the Ubuntu chief probably would have spent his precious keynote address words on another pressing topic facing the Linux community.

There’s an old debate about which camp responds more quickly to security vulnerabilities: the open source or closed source community. It’s been said that the open source community can move more quickly to address bugs than software giants with many moving corporate parts. It seems Ubuntu’s chief wants to make sure the perception of rapid bug response stay in favor of open source.

What do you think about Shuttleworth’s perspectives?