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Shuttleworth Says Canonical Is Not Cash-Flow Positive
eldavojohn writes "Mark Shuttleworth, the millionaire bankroller who keeps Ubuntu going strong, has revealed 'Canonical is not cash-flow positive' just as version 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) of the popular Linux distribution is released today. In a call, he said he 'had no objection' in funding Canonical for another three to five years. He did say, however, that if they concentrated on the server edition of Ubuntu that they could be profitable in two years."
Red Hat itself has made it public that the desktop market is a very difficult one. Ubuntu has made very decent inroads to the desktop market for Linux, but it is true they need to put much more effort on the server side to become truly competitive. I think they have done some good work, but look forward to see what the community can provide in the next couple years. It's very hard to start competing in a market that is already spoken for by a few big players.
They are late to the party, and while I am glad for the strides they have made, Novell and Red Hat can eat them for lunch with other tie ins with their product line.
The server version, otherwise known as Debian.
Hasn't this gone full circle? The Debian release cycle is too long and uncertain so out comes Ubuntu. Ubuntu takes from unstable, fixes some bugs, adds some polish and makes a decent desktop OS. Now Ubuntu wants to concentrate on the server which is exactly what Debian stable is for? Please. Canonical would be better served by just supporting Debian.
3 years - 2 years = not a problem.
But er.. yeah.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Installed it in a vm already. Don't see much worth shouting about myself. No libmapi...
Debian?
...give Linus more ammo to complain about desktop Linux. :p
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
To me Linux has never been profitable in the Desktop-User side, but in the Servers Side. How can one make profit in the desktop world? Free software is mostly based on services not software license selling and it's not only libre but gratis (free as beer).
Linux (Ubuntu) has become really easy to use, and Linux users are mostly advanced users which can take care of themselves rather than paying for support, of for another service. And nowadays, most services are platform independent, IMHO.
Mr. Shuttleworth is truly praise-"worthy" (forgive the pun) because he's willing to put his money where his mouth is, and pay out of pocket to support his principles.
In the end, nothing is actually "free". While people can and do put in their time, without expecting to be compensated for their work on the various Linux distributions, or other open-source software, they do so because they have other jobs that support them financially. As the Linux desktop market expands, there will be a need for even more people to dedicate even more time to maintaining and perfecting the codebase... and this will require a positive cash flow into the industry. One way or the other we (the consumers of these wonderful products) are going to have to pay... and we shouldn't be apprehensive about it. I have no problem with paying let's say $50/year for Ubuntu, because it has worked great for me.
Hands down?
I'm curious to find one single major advantage Ubuntu has over Red Hat, CentOS, SLES, or openSUSE in an enterprise environment.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Is that he is willing to keep bankrolling it for now. I give him credit, whether Ubuntu makes it or not, for that.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Desktop users are not the ones likely to need to purchase support contracts, aside from business environments. Every business that I've worked for that has used Linux has used Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation for that very reason. Canonical's big problem here is that they have taken over a market where the majority of sales come from people buying off-the-shelf licenses or through OEM sales. the only way that they could get around that would be to charge say... $20/copy of Ubuntu to Dell, Asus, etc. to provide support for their netbook users.
If they concentrate on server, we can see 2008 will mark the year of the linux desktop.
Noooooooooo! Say it ain't so, Joe!
Here at the University, our department has a few clusters and a few standalone processing machines with a bit of disk attached. We were using ROCKS on the clusters and Slackware on the standalones, but then ROCKS went south in terms of hardware recognition, installation ease, and reconfiguration ease (so says my cluster admin). Now we use Slackware on everything.
However, when I asked him if he would like to try to use something with dependency checking, he suggested, not Debian, but Ubuntu...as he felt the server version of Ubuntu was essentially Debian anyway. Ubuntu's nice, but for us it all comes down to how easy it is to change, install our non-standard apps, and how often it requires updates.
Thoughts from the /. community?
Give me a Commercial version that is a bit more polished and has the important stuff already installed and ready instead of me having to go and run the installers to get everything ready. also get a "remote help" system in place so aunt millie can press "help me" and type in my email address and then I can easily help her with it, or she can call you and get paid support.
Honestly, Ubuntu is ALMOST there. if it takes a pay for version for me to point the Friends and family at then so be it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh come on Mr. GNAA, you can do better than that. Jumpy Jigaboo? It even involves the next one up alphabetically.
There are ways canonical could try to raise revenue. One is by selling versions to desktop users with technical support or extras like a user guide. It could also sell t-shirts, mugs and other such things to bring in more revenue. It could even sell third party Linux books.
It's on the GNOME road map for 2.26, look for it in Ubuntu 9.04
Try this:
sudo apt-get install openchangeclient
sudo apt-get install openchangeserver
or just:
sudo apt-get install libmapi
Either way, according to the OpenChange site, it's in Intrepid.
My blog
I'd agree with you if you weren't a) an idiot and b) wrong.
You've totally missed the point of the open source model. Linux doesn't *need* a profitable parent company. Projects like PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, the Linux kernel itself and others prove that companies are not needed in order to create excellent software. Debian existed long before Ubuntu, and will live long after it, should Ubuntu die. If Ubuntu dies, you can be damn sure a community will spring up to take the slack up now that demand for an apt based distro that isn't 3 years behind has been proven and an appetite created.
As for the impossibility of Linux profitability, Red Hat's financial statements show a consistent, increasing profit, quarter over quarter, for the last 2 years. Go troll elsewhere please.
I hate printers.
... for users.
I'm thinking easy on line storage integrated with OS and applications. Similarly they could offer backup space, email accounts, web space, picture storage and sharing,, Jabber service, OpenID, etc.
Think ".Mac/MobileMe" style services.
I would certainly be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee for a nicely integrated service.
No, they don't want to concentrate on the server.
From the summary (emphasis mine):
A hypothetical does not a fact make.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
This raises an interesting point that I'd like to see /.ers discuss:
Without the charity of well-to-do geeks or companies that fund open source development from profitable product lines, can Open Source succeed at the enterprise level?
This thread is a good example of the first case. Sun/Open Office, the Google/Mozilla "relationship", IBM, et al./Eclipse are examples of the second as is the general practice of different companies employing Linus, Guido and a few other key people to keep Linux/Python/etc going.
Without the strong investment from those with deep pockets, can Open Source software progress at the rate needed to remain viable in the enterprise? What happens when the product lines funding those projects start losing money?
If you respond with counter-examples, make sure you do a proper accounting of who is really doing the development work on the project. Is it people in their spare time or is it paid workers being funded by the revenues from other projects? And, of course, focus on Open Source software that is being pushed and is _viable_ for enterprise use - hobbiest level software and boutique libraries will always have volunteers available.
-Chris
A couple of people on this list have jumped to the conclusion that the "server version" of Ubuntu is Debian. I'm not sure where that comes from...Debian can be used on the desktop or the server (I'm using it for both), and Ubuntu can be used on both, as well.
By "server version", I'm guessing Mark is talking backoffice functionality: for example, beefing up the ability to connect to NAS or SAN devices, remote management, etc.
You know what's going to happen, is that Open Source advocates are going to argue for public funding of open source projects because they can't make money giving something away for free, and there's never going to be enough donations or volunteers to pay the people you need to pay. It's going to be like public radio, all over again. They are too good to charge for ads, make billions of dollars merchandising Sesame Street, take corporate money anyway, and still run ads of a sort, and yet STILL look for public money and will probably look for a lot more once the Dems get in.
I imagine that, while Windows may stop because of WGA, Linux will periodically halt and start playing entertaining videos about all the buffoons that write it, as part of an NPR like Linux beggars night. Donate to Linux, and get a stack of 2nd tier magazines and a handy tote bag!
This is my sig.
Even the poorest of the poor who have a computer can afford $10 per release or at least per year. If you truly cannot afford that little amount, then do $5 or if you're really on hard times, then so long as everyone else donates something, they're helping out.
Those a-holes that dozens of free Ubuntu CDs and hand them out without donating a dime piss me off. In the long run it might help as it gets Ubuntu into the hands of the people, but most of those people won't realize that they can or, IMO, should, donate to the project.
If everyone who used Ubuntu donated just a little bit and institutions who install Ubuntu across their entire school or company paid just $10 per install per release they'd really be helping out. Either that or came up with what they thought was a fair number. Instead of $7,000 for 700 seats, maybe just $1000 for 700 seats. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than Microsoft or Apple.
If you can give more and want to, then do so. I give to Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Gimp for each release and donate time supporting other projects.
It might also help Ubuntu and other projects to become non-profit (501c3 in the US) as then donations would be tax deductible. Of course there's other overhead (administrative and monetary) associated with that and you have to way the pros and cons of doing so.
I am a huge fan of OSS. I have been using open-source stuff for some three years now and I think it's time I gave something back. To this effect, I have decided to donate a modest sum (modest by student standards) to the following outfits (one every month): *Ubuntu (for showing me a world outside Winduhs) *Gnome (ease of use) *Inkscape (how would I ever make diagrams without this?) *Kile (easy to use LaTeX editor) *Amarok (not just music) *other (this list will certainly be expanded) Show your appreciation by donating!
He's just upset because his buddies got caught trying to kill Obama. He'll skip J-J and go right for Krazy Klansman.
Make this offering please so I can replace these redhat boxes at work. I quit the whole redhat deal when
they totally abandoned the desktop. I want my desktop and servers running the same os but I have to
me able to buy support for the boss. Not that I would ever call anyhow but the boss needs to spend money
to be happy.
Got Code?
You've totally missed the point of the open source model. Linux doesn't *need* a profitable parent company. Projects like PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, the Linux kernel itself and others prove that companies are not needed in order to create excellent software. Debian existed long before Ubuntu, and will live long after it, should Ubuntu die. If Ubuntu dies, you can be damn sure a community will spring up to take the slack up now that demand for an apt based distro that isn't 3 years behind has been proven and an appetite created.
While OSS certainly produces good software; in many ways it's a self licking ice cream cone - it can create a self sustaining community that finds it satisfies their needs but has trouble moving beyond that into the mainstream. They are often content in copying the features they find useful in closed source commercial products but see no need to really innovate.
As a result, many OSS projects remain somewhat quirky copies of existing commercial products; with just enough differences to prevent them from being more widely adopted. They simply are not better than the commercial products (other than being free) - so people simply stick with what they currently use or what is the "standard."
Companies, OTOH, provide direction and assess customer needs to drive features - which requires some degree of control and expertise beyond coding. Would OO have gotten to where it is today without Sun? Maybe, but it doesn't hurt to have cash and direction to spur development.
The other issue with communities is that people will eventually lose interest and move on; or decide they don't like the direction and fork development. In the former that eventually leads to orphaned projects with promise (GIMPShop anyone?) and in the latter confusion in the broader market over which one to use.
OSS development is great, but there are some fundamental issues that hinder wider adoption of it.
As for the impossibility of Linux profitability, Red Hat's financial statements show a consistent, increasing profit, quarter over quarter, for the last 2 years. Go troll elsewhere please.
Yes, they realized that the money is in consulting and services; Linux is merely the road in. Not a bad model; and one that many Windows consultants use as well.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Canonical has done quite a lot to advance the linux desktop. It is free software and has no "retail" feature limited version. The repositories and package manager are fully functional. Their forums are excellent and free. If you find Ubuntu useful why wouldn't you offer them something for their service?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
I'm a network engineer, like a lot of Slashdotters here. I focus on Ubuntu & LTSP in educational type environments.
I would *gladly* pay Canonical for upper-tier support, if it were affordable to me, the small-business. As of right now, Canonical support services offers server support (which includes LTSP servers) for $750/year, PER SERVER - and this is just 9-5, weekday only, 10 "cases/issues" maximum, support. This is pretty difficult for me, as one of my clients is a 7-site elementary school district, which have all migrated to Ubuntu and LTSP. That would be US $5,250 a year. It seems that you can't span the 10 support cases over different servers, which is one of the reasons why this support model is so unattractive to me.
It's amazing how much LTSP has developed over the past few years, but there are still tons of things that can be improved, with a little TLC and bugfixing. As it is now, I am very active in helping report and troubleshoot bugs - but again, I want support from Canonical because IANAP, and they employ people who work directly on LTSP in Ubuntu. I've heard straight from them that they just don't have enough time to work on it - and it's a shame, given the number of people with LTSP up and running. If the support model was a bit more flexible for us smaller tech businesses (usually the ones who push Linux in the first place), I think Canonical could be incredibly successful.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
That only works for software that is being written for a highly technical audience. (I'll state that Mozilla is an exception, but they grew out of the Netscape culture.)
Indeed, every Linux-based distro comes packed with these great services and tools, but the only real promise of getting them vertically integrated and putting them to work in a modern user environment has been in association with some kind of for-profit model.
Without that, you can forget about FOSS developers focusing on delivering coherent solutions for those "stupid idiots" (end users).
Mark Shuttleworth had loads of money already and just wanted to make a user friendly version of Linux for the masses. There is a reason why it's called Ubuntu, it's not really to do with profiteering. If you think that's strange or eccentric then you should remember that he was one of the first space tourists. Ubuntu has never been in profit and has been sending free cd's to all kinds of places. I don't think Mark will care much if he has to spend a bit of money to realise his dream.
The problem is that if they shrink the market, then MS will expand to compete. This is a simple issue; keep the fight on your land against an intractable enemy with near infinite resources, or go to their land and force them to be all over the place?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not sure that servers are as great a business model as he thinks. There's a lot more competition for servers, and the desktop is Ubuntu's strength compared to other Linux distros.
But I may be wrong... what's the big attraction for Ubuntu on a server as compared to other Linux servers?
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/donations I'll give Mark some money. I'm a Linux and open source fan and I think that Ubuntu will have my support as seen as this is the distro I'm using.
As a non-professional server admin maintaining two boxes (a VPS for myself, and a webserver for a university club I belong to), I'm happy. I chose it because I'm quite familiar with Ubuntu since I use it on the desktop, and I hate RHEL.
It's very lightweight. Server installs almost nothing by default, letting you install just what you need. After setting up the club's computer with a mail server, MySQL service, and Lighttpd, the thing was only using 37MB of RAM (nice, considering the box only has 384MB). So, not a lot of cruft there.
It's also, as I said, what I'm familiar with, so maintenance is quite smooth.
They also have easy upgrade paths (although upgrading between versions would be stupid in a production environment). Some of the other enterprise-oriented distros (RHEL, I'm looking at you) don't support upgrades very well.
On the other hand, while people like me might be an excellent target market for their server release, we're also not buying support contracts, so that's a bit of a problem.
I wonder if it would be possible for Canonical to work out a deal with Google where they offered a donation version of Ubuntu, where every browser installed onto this version would set the default search to Google, or maybe set the future linux port of Chrome as the default browser, etc. They could offer this alongside the regular version and label this separate verion as a donation towards Canonical. If Mozilla was able to do something like this, why not Canonical?
I think you've totally missed what's been driving Linux progress for the last few years. Money. Lots of it. Corporate money paying developers. Virtually every single successful open source project has large corporate backing of some sort, be it Apache, the kernel, Firefox, mysql, etc..
Without a profitable parent company, they can't afford to pay those developers, and thus paid development goes away, and then you're left with the snail pace of "in my spare time" development. You're also stuck with the "only doing what scratches my itch" development, and many of the finer fit and polish elements that have gone into Ubuntu and other projects would be hard to find.
Would these projects die? No, but they would greatly slow down, possibly to the point that the majority of users would give up waiting for them.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You mean, like,
1. Debian's testing distribution?
2. backports.org for people that run Debian stable but want updates of some packages?
I think you are trolling yourself there too.
LTSP was cool and a good idea until the bottom dropped out of the hardware prices. It no longer is that much
more cost effective than buying a Linux preloaded machine. I don't even know of any companies deploying Citrix any longer for the very same reason.
Got Code?
I disagree, as the Free + paid support model has worked well with Free/Open/Net BSD for longer then Linux has even been a concept.
Problem i see is that the linux world is too fractured for the same model to work. Everyone and their uncle are trying to get in the game to make a buck.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...the Renaissance relied heavily on such donations from sponsors. People like Leonardo da Vinci simply could not have operated without them. This is a valid model to work with, as history has unquestionably shown, but it's unstable if the rich and powerful get unseated, as happens when the economy collapses.
The other option is to have a public sector Open Source laboratory, funded through the tax system. Americans hate taxes, though, even in those cases where the alternative costs them more, gives them less freedom and has less accountability. It would mean convincing a lot of skeptical (possibly paranoid) people that the Government was capable of running such a facility in a mature and intelligent fashion, and that it would do some good. A "National Institute for Open Source" (NIOS) might not even require taxes to be raised - I imagine the costs for such a place would be well below the variations in the price-tag for NIST, NIH, NSF and related organizations already in the public sector. And even if it did involve raising taxes, how much does it take to have a few dozen people on workstations covering the full scope of supported hardware? Adding a 0.1% raise to the uppermost tax bracket that nobody on this site even comes close to would more than cover such a facility, and frankly the amount they'd "lose" would probably be less than they amount they lose behind the sofa or pay on designer shoes in a given week. In other words, they'd either not notice or not care.
Remember, this NIOS doesn't have to be big or sophisticated. A handful of people who are skilled coders and skilled QAers testing and debugging software deemed "critical" for Government users (the Linux and *BSD kernels, for example, along with GCC, Glibc, and a selection of fundamental tools and libraries) on all hardware the Government users deemed "important" (which is everything Linux runs on, other than perhaps the Vax, but given that they hold onto old hardware...) and you've covered everything a NIOS would need to do. It wouldn't be a distribution, it wouldn't favour any particular system or technology and it wouldn't be concerned with mainstream applications. Applications are the affairs of vendors. Governments should only be concerned with ensuring the foundations are correct and solid.
Of course, everyone has a different idea of what a NIOS would do. My vision won't necessarily be the same as other people's, but I do feel that my vision would be doable, cost-effective, genuinely justifiable as being in the national interest and sufficiently outside of the scope of competing with the private sector that nobody would feel threatened or believe that the competition they were facing was getting an unfair advantage. Microsoft has reused Open Source code in the past - network stacks from BSD, Kerberos for security, NCSA's webserver for part of IIS, etc. Other vendors doubtless do the same. Having a dedicated facility for debugging such code therefore IMPROVES the position of the vendors out there, as they can then focus on genuine added value, rather than duplicating all the QA and refactoring work. It would eliminate part of the common denominator that was unnecessary, wasteful and not really getting done anyway (as demonstrated by all the bugs in Microsoft products).
People will complain about my idea, probably throwing in words like "socialism" in the process, but this isn't a proposal for an actual Government department. Aside from the fact that I don't have the means to set one up even if I wanted to, I am much more interested in hearing how this idea could itself be bugfixed to make it viable, or in hearing alternative ideas that people might come up with once they stop thinking about the idiotic ways Governments have screwed things up and start thinking about what a centralized facility could do in principle when it has the freedom to pursue what it likes without sponsors to answer to.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"...What Mr. Shuttleworth did with Canonical and Ubuntu was divebomb the
distribution pool..."
An interesting (and personal) opinion about this read in the Mandriva
planet:
http://www.happyassassin.net/2008/10/28/why-i-dont-like-canonical/
.
What I see is Linux at 0.57% in Nov 07 and 0.91% in Sept 08. MS Vista at 9.19% in Nov 07 and 18.33% in Sept 08.
The MacIntel alone with six times the market share of Linux on the desktop. W2K with twice the market share.
Think hits to Fox News.
W2K never saw significant sales as a consumer OS.
Yet eight ? years later this industrious little workhorse still out polls Linux on the web.
"I'd agree with you if you weren't a) an idiot and b) wrong."
Holy cow, I'm going to write that down and claim I thought it up. Beautiful work, Sir, I tip my hat.
I used to buy the RedHat boxed sets before they were dropped. Although I can download a distro in a reasonable time via cable, it is a pain burning and labeling disks - and I liked putting the RedHat stickers on my boxes. Maybe there is a profit center with traditional distribution for Ubuntu.
My dad ordered an Ubuntu DVD from a 3rd party distributor - and it was defective, so we had to burn our own anyway.
Failing that, there must be a market for supporting the laptops and netbooks being preinstalled with Ubuntu these days.
I think you've totally missed what's been driving Linux progress for the last few years. Money. Lots of it. Corporate money paying developers. (...) Without a profitable parent company, they can't afford to pay those developers, and thus paid development goes away, and then you're left with the snail pace of "in my spare time" development. (...) Would these projects die? No, but they would greatly slow down, possibly to the point that the majority of users would give up waiting for them.
"In my spare time" depends on how many that have spare time. and I wager there's now a considerably larger pool of potential developers online and a larger market share using it that could contribute. Somehow it got off the ground to where companies started putting money into it, it certainly should be able to keep going on its own. It also depends on how much you think a computer system is built once or must be constantly rebuilt. If I look at my own demands and expectations from say 2003 to today, they have not changed that much. Linux on the other hand has come a long way in fulfilling many of them though. All that really matters is if that gap is closing, and I think it would be closing faster than my expectations change under any circumstance. After all, most of our needs are rather static like "write documents" "check mail" "listen to music" "play video" and rarely change. I'm not saying Linux does everything but it sounds very strange to me if Linux would ever do less than it already does. I'm using Linux because it's usable to me now, not because of some future pie-in-the-sky. If I hadn't been ready to swtich from Windows I wouldn't have switched, simple as that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think anyone could get into a distro battle due to my comment, but my primary point was that if there was a linux-based corporation that wanted to really stabilize and produce a polished, finished desktop linux OS, it'd be Canonical. Novell and RedHat are strongest when working on stable servers, while Canonical could start reigning in the lackluster enterprise linux desktop market.
How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?
Mark, since I'm sure you'll be reading these comments....
Roughly how much do each of the users of Ubuntu need to pay you to put Canonical cash positive?
Us business users are the most likely to pay you some money. If it's something small like $100/yr then that's probably inside discretionary spend limits for most businesses, and I'm pretty certain you have the goodwill for this to become a cash stream. Personally, I'd have no problem signing off on $100 a year, knowing that I wasn't going to get anything for it except an ongoing series of Ubuntus. Call the service something like 'Continuity option' which might be the ability to download the next version for free, or payment for managing the ongoing development.
(Yes everyone, we're aware that it's already downloadable for free, and I want to pay to keep it that way. Yes, we're aware of the provisions of the GPL too. Yes, we're also almost all aware of the Canonical promise to keep it free. And I'd like to make sure that it's financially viable to keep it going.)
And while you're here, thanks to you and everyone else who worked hard to put Intrepid and all the previous versions together. I shall be upgrading tomorrow evening.
Canonical has made SOME good decisions. I like the idea of a "safemode" graphical recovery in case X is borked. However, I think that OpenSUSE pisses on Ubuntu from a substantial height. It is my preference and I can choose what I wish. For servers, SLES, RHEL, CentOS (which should not really be a choice on its own, as it IS RHEL minus RH) and maybe (and begrudgingly) Oracle Linux, which is also mostly RHEL based.
If Canonical tanks, I hope their changes will have been integrated upstream.
.
In rounded numbers:
Jan 08 XP 75% + Vista 12% + W2K 3% = 90%
Sep 08 XP 69% + Vista 18% + W2K 2% = 89%
Win NT, Win 98, Win ME and the stray Win 95 system retain a combined share of 1% [rounded]:
Operating System Market Share
Which makes the net loss 0%.
Why can't people just say 'not making a profit'? Damn murdering of the English language!
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Anyone noticed how the criticism of linux desktop distros, especially ubuntu, is getting more and more just about hardware and driver issues? Seems like the desktops (I only can speak for gtk/ gnome) are quite usable and I hear less and less complaints about them.
;) Which, btw, was dead simple.
I switched a year ago and my xubuntu is running quite fine on my amd 64, and the last reason to boot into windows has vanished since i took the adventure and got my WoW to work with wine
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
If I can use that as an analogy. There's not as much money to be made selling raw resources as there is in using the raw resources to construct a value added product. Example, trees. You can make some money selling logs, but there's more to be made turning logs into lumber then into something even more useful, like finished furniture ( I worked at a furniture factory that did just that, bought raw logs, had their own mill and kiln, then made furniture, they developed more of an economic vertical stack and were more profitable than most because their costs of production were lower and they had a better handle on supply, etc). Crude oil sells for so much a barrel raw, then it goes to a lot more after refining, because it has been compounded into a value added product. A bushel of corn is worth 4 bucks, but after milling and turned into corn flakes, it is worth a couple hundred a bushel.
The good universal money to be made with open source is the same way, treat the initial product as a raw resource, then use that to do something else, some other aspect of business where you need those raw resources. Here's a closer example, google uses open source, re-tweaks it to fit, then constructed an internet search engine, which in itself is still a raw resource, albeit of a higher technological value, because it is free to use..but it's getting closer now. They then go one more step/layer and sell relevant ads combined with offering the free search, and that then puts them over the top into sustainable profit.
If Canonical wants their development of Ubuntu to be profitable, they need to do something similar, even if it is just using their server model, and coming up with a server business, hosting or running the server farms for other companies, etc, similar to how google runs their own server farms. You have to compound your way to some bucks by adding value above the raw resource level, if that first level is not profitable yet. Treat open source as your starting point in a business solution on your way to making money,not the end point and it makes more sense and is easier to see. You want layers of value-added effort until you hit that layer that really will give you some market and money.
I'd "click" on "buy" right now.
... send them 1/10 of the price of windows vista. version dependant on how yo9u use ubuntu. that should help
Then check the prize given to the mythical inventor of the game.
If the same speed of growth would continue Windows would be over sooner than you think.
But to know this we have to talk again next year. What I remember is when Linux was literally smuggled in any datacentre, what I saw this afternoon in a major PC shop here in London is that 20% of the laptops in offer had Linux installed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People claiming Linux has difficulty moving to the mainstream have not worked recently with real data centres making money for big companies.
To state that Linux is not mainstream is ludicrous nowadays, Linux is a recognized solution, it may or may not be used, but is an option no longer laughed at in any serious company.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Linux has grown from a hobby to a corporate sponsored philosophy, but somehow that is a minus.
Gee, there are some people impossible to please.
Now the year of the Linux desktop has finally arrived for real (Acer, Asus, Dell are selling Linux laptops today) but we will continue to hear the same tired objections.
Well, whatever frankly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Open Source projects existed *before* companies sponsored them one way or another.
To pretend all of the sudden that corporate support is a necessary condition for the existence of Open Source Software is completely ludicrous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I use Ubuntu in 3 machines at home, my elderly mother uses is on her place (putting a dent to the nonsense that old non technical people get confused with Linux).
So I just donated $100 instead of coming with these brilliant ideas about how to make money.
Perhaps Canonical should have a donation drive once or twice a year so we desktop users can thank them for their efforts.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Home users aren't going to pay for anything when the free versions are so strong and popular.
In fact I probably have fewer problems with Fedora or Ubuntu than I would for a subscription distro because the free communities are so much larger and I have a better chance of finding a forum or mailing list with someone who had just my problem (note this free competition doesn't hurt the enterprise distros as they're really looking for stability).
Really I think they need OEMs to step in, the OEM pays Canonical a per box license and Canonical makes sure those boxes run smoothly, they could even do end user support as well, it would all be rolled into the purchase price.
Remember the value of software isn't in the bits, it's in the support, and I consumers to explicitly shell out extra for support.
I stole this Sig
Let's take a fairly fundamental piece of software in science - the maths library. This needs to be able to do various transforms, perform linear algebra, perform matrix algebra and so on. And this needs to be done fast over a distributed system. Many of the same mathematical routines can be found in pure sound/music synthesis, 3D image manipulation and projection, audio/video codecs, and so on. Distributing code/data across multiple nodes isn't that different from distributing across multiple cores, except the cores only have a single processor cache. Some of the maths, therefore, directly applies to the multimedia sector, the commercial production of synthesizers, the improvement in digital decoders for television, and the games market.
What about more esoteric stuff? Is there any value in the public sector with NASA's open-source hypersonic computational fluid dynamics software? Or Colorado School of Mines' package on seismic data analysis? The first of those - well, it might improve the design of flight simulators, maybe. The other is basically a package for analyzing signals based on timing - very helpful for anyone working with ground-penetrating RADAR. Several other packages for signals processing exist - many sponsored by the Government, including VSIPL - which could be extremely handy for anyone working with software radio, speech recognition, or other projects (hobbyist and commercial) that need signal processing software that is both rigorously correct and fast.
FCC-compliant software for handling the ARINC bus protocols is probably not -that- valuable, but even there, there are enough amateur groups and enthusiasts who maintain historic aircraft that I would be wary of saying this would "never" be useful. Commercial components eventually get discontinued and such groups use whatever resources they can (including cannibalizing wrecks) to build their own replacement parts. That isn't true of modern electronic flight systems and the data buses they use - for now. But it's possible to imagine that such software would eventually be in demand.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Companies, OTOH, provide direction and assess customer needs to drive features - which requires some degree of control and expertise beyond coding. Would OO have gotten to where it is today without Sun?
I found the rest of your post quite interesting (although I don't entirely agree with all of it), but this is just a horrible example. OpenOffice sucks donkey balls. "Where OOo is today" is a half-assed, half-speed MS Office 2000 clone with an ugly widget set. Its only selling points are MSO document compatibility (which admittedly is unsurpassed) and a pretty good styles implementation. It is just "un-horrible" enough for Sun to be able to tell its corporate customers "Hey, you should really try StarOffice, it's better!" and not get laughed out of the conference room. OpenOffice could have been an innovative project, an honest attempt at employing some new ideas in office software (see: KOffice). But Sun's stranglehold will never allow that.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
The fact that package management actually works, and is consistent from release to release, is a massive advantage over SuSE.
"Everyone use YaST... No, wait, APT4RPM... No, wait, Yum. No, let's have everyone switch to SMART. No, forget that, let's switch to zypper!"
Thanks, SuSE, I love switching package management systems.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Linux is nice but I recommend keeping it far away from any bank account. It's a black hole for money...
I guess that the guys over at NYSE are bunch of idiots trusting RHEL with zillions of $$ of transactions every day? perhaps some of your money too?
"Canonical would be better served by just supporting Debian."
This is an excellent idea. I have clients that would line up for a Debian server / Ubuntu client support contract. We already know the combination is rock solid. The only thing that occasionally keeps me from putting Debian on the back end is the lack of a decent support contract system.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
I'm surprised that many people, even my fellow Slackers, don't know about Slackware's mailing lists. In usual Slackware down-to-earth-and-keep-it-simple approach to things, you just subscribe to the security mailing list, and you get an email when the team has applied a security patch to a package in the 'current' tree. Simple, effective, and you never worry about having a patch pushed to you that going to break something. From what I understand (I'm not on the list, as I take Slackware proper and then do my own thing and keep my own package tree) they're patched as soon as upstream has a patch.
As for GP, I'd just like to point out that Slackware is the most 'vanilla' distro you're going to find; you can customize it, cut it down, mold it... I've got an old socket A Duron @ 900 MHz that cold boots to a ~50 Slackware distro (services included). I run iSCSI that I compiled (user and kernel sides) by hand with the libraries that I use. With dependency tracking and whatnot, if you want a single package, you might end up apt-getting/yumming 300 megs of Gnome and all of its services because somewhere something is linked to GTK, whose library is compiled with a different libc than the one you're currently running, and next thing you know, you're dropping in a new kernel, libc, a handful of services, GTK and a desktop environment because you wanted a text-only calendar that needed a single library. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. I had that problem on RHEL today - I wanted to install Zimbra, which needed fetchmail, but I wanted to get rid of all the other mail programs and just run Zimbra. So, I removed dovecot, postfix, and sendmail, which pulled out fetchmail because it needed an smtpdaemon. So, I yummed fetchmail back, and it pulled in exim with it to meet that requirement (even though Zimbra brings postfix with it... but it's not from upstream, so I can't let fetchmail use it to meet the dependency). To summarize, I wanted to remove three email programs, it took out four, and then made me put three back in. In Slackware the answer would have been './configure && make install', and to remove them I'd have 'make uninstall'. Just something to think about.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
FOSS comes up with innovative new stuff all the time. The problem with really innovative stuff, though, is that people aren't used to it and don't accept it easily.
Put identity in the browser.
Last year, it was zillions, now it's about fifty cents. Times change.
Put identity in the browser.
I take objection to your "OSS" doesn't innovate line (that I hear way too often). Let me run down some stuff:
FOSS comes up with innovative new stuff all the time. The problem with really innovative stuff, though, is that people aren't used to it and don't accept it easily.
First, I did not say OSS does not innovate, but did say many OSS projects are not. Most people do not care about OSS, and free is only so much of a draw. For mainstream desktop applications the average user worries that it won't work in the Win/Mac environment (which is false) and so don't even try it; if they are aware of its existence.
Which brings up another challenge OSS faces - getting people to know it is available. It's generally a well kept secret so it's not even considered by most users. Until people are aware of what it can do it will remain relegated to the margins. I'll give you an example - a local school teacher told the class they'll need PowerPoint for their projects. Until I pointed out OO and NeoOffice can do the same things she did not even know their were alternatives and parents need not shell out $100 for Office.
I see far too many people undervalue the idea of marketing - when that's what FOSS really needs. Commercial products can simply adopt neat ideas that come out of the OSS community - the community needs to convince users they offer a better alternative. Great ideas are useless if you can't get people to adopt them.
As for innovation - that's where a FOSS product, in the mainstream market (Office / Photoshop / Desktop) could really make a splash by offering something radically better and attracting the mainstream presses attention. I do contend that would probably require a company behind it driving the process towards a goal; rather than a random walk down code street.
The advantage of FOSS is that the developers are not held to a narrow single corporate vision and goal, the disadvantage is the developers are not held to a narrow single corporate vision. The challenge is to get the talent to agree on a vision and then keep pursuing it. Like herding cats, that's easier said than done.
As a result, I think the adoption of Linux as a desktop OS will be slow and may never reach a critical mass; and most OSS will remain the choice of the more tech aware users.
Finally, you got to love /., where:
Thankfully, a few people are open to differing viewpoints and I have Karma to burn.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I can give one piece of anecdotal evidence to support their not being cash flow positive. 3 days ago I sent an email to inquire about purchasing server support for a project that I need to get going immediately. The urgency was expressed in the communication. To date no response.
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world"
They are often content in copying the features they find useful in closed source commercial products but see no need to really innovate.
Yeah, like that crazy knock-off Apache...oh, wait...
"Just a fox, a whisper."
They are often content in copying the features they find useful in closed source commercial products but see no need to really innovate.
Yeah, like that crazy knock-off Apache...oh, wait...
Yeah, because "often" means every ... oh, wait...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.