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Is Ubuntu Selling Out or Growing Up?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the six-of-one dept.

AlexGr notes an article by Jeff Gould where he says " Sometimes I wonder whether Ubuntu is really an open source software company any more. Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL'd and open source by definition. But still, the Ubuntu distro is sponsored by a traditional for-profit company. The answer that has recently emerged to this question is, "yes and no." Yes, of course, because Ubuntu's web site promises that the distro "will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates." But Ubuntu the enterprise ecosystem — understood as the collection of desktops and servers running Ubuntu in a given organization — is not."

3 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Just how is Canonical making money, anyway? by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since Canonical is a for-profit company, this raises an interesting question. Namely, how exactly are they making money? Their wikipedia entry only indicates a couple of minor proprietary products, neither of which I've ever even heard of. Is this one of those internet boom style companies that only makes money in theory, or do they actually have an income source?

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Just how is Canonical making money, anyway? by wile_e_wonka · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The summary asserts that Canonical is a "traditional for-profit company," but the Wikipedia entry you point to paints a picture of a company that is not traditional. For example, it says the company was created for the purpose of promoting free software products. I don't really see anything traditional about that.

      As for how they make their money, I think they primarily earn revenue by selling support for Ubuntu. You know, so, like, a business installs Ubuntu on its servers or on a bunch of desktops or something, they can purchase a support agreement for those computers from Canonical.

  2. Re:Paid Support Just Like RedHat's RHEL by r7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    RHEL and SUSE, and their free equivalents already do absolutely everything you need a server OS to do, are stable as hell(and way ahead of canonical when it comes to security Nothing could be further from the truth. A default install of all three will illustrate:
    * Best gui install and package tools:
        1) Ubuntu (synaptic)
        2) RHEL (yumex)
        3) SuSE (yast)
    * Fewest unnecessary applications running and listening to open network ports (portmap, nfs, xfs, ...):
        1) Ubuntu
        2) SuSE
        3) RHEL
    * Do pkg deinstalls also remove dependencies:
        YES) Ubuntu
        NO) SuSE, RHEL
    * Best hardware compatibility (wifi drivers, etc):
      1) Ubuntu
      2) SuSE
      3) RHEL

    As to support, no Linux support is particularly good from my perspective (as a multi-decade sysadmin) and none compare to the Sun or IBM of old. That's the fault of poorly documented and sloppily designed GPL software for the most part, but also of proprietary x86 hardware manufacturers.

    So there's a really big opportunity here, for the first company to do Linux support well. Ubuntu is currently the most promising candidate in this field, by a large margin (from the perspective of someone who works on all these OS and several others every day).