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."

Comments

Re:Linux is for suckers

[MrNaz]

Linux is nice but I recommend keeping it far away from any bank account. It's a black hole for money...

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.

Re:Of course they should concentrate on the server

[Legion_SB]

Wow. Did anyone else notice that Win2K is actually going up? Maybe folks burnt on Vista are going back to the fugly goodness that is Win2K Pro. ;-)

You might want to double-check the dates on that chart, friend. Win2000 is only going "up" when reading in reverse chronological order.