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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."
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.
The name helps sell PHBs, but the support from either RH or Novell is far better. I am sure Canonical can do well, but will they put boots on the ground in enough time to support outages?
What is the model for cloning machines, deploying machines and such?
What is the structure for connecting to various directories?
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.
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.
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.
yeah, but still the fact that the increase of linux is almost 90% in little less than a year, it seems as though the ball has started to roll.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
... 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.
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
or to crunch the numbers another way - Windows lost 5.5% of the desktop market in a little over a year....
ouch, I bet that smarts.
Saying your sales are up x% is a gimmick when the entire market is actually up x+3% sure, but when you say my marketshare is up by x%, that's not a gimmick. And Linux's market share is definitely up according to that chart. Vista doesn't particularly count IMO, you have to take Windows as a whole - because those who are used to Windows will often just take Vista with their new machine. You don't get many machines that come with Linux by default, but lots of PCs just come with Vista these days, and obviously a lot of people either don't know the difference between Windows versions, or still want Vista just because it's the latest thing. So for Linux adoption to be on the rise it shows that people are choosing Linux over Windows.
I wonder how much of the Linux adoption was spurred by devices like the EEE PC or Linux based mobile phones, how much was just webservers, and how much is due to more user friendly distros on desktops and laptops? And if they count Linux on mobile phones in their stats, do they count Windows Mobile as Windows? There's also the matter of what websites the stats are gathered from.. I'd love to see the stats google have on OS hits to google for each country they operate in.
which is totally what she said
.
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.
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.