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:Hands Down

[wytcld]

A single major advantage: It's Debian-based, but more current, better honed. I haven't run SUSE, but deb package management is far better than Red Hat's rpm, and that can be a huge advantage.

A disadvantage: There are some Debian-specific errors that Ubuntu has inherited. The installation routine for the server version, for instance, uses its own partitioner rather than one of the standard *fdisk variants. That partitioner doesn't write partitions on the cylinder boundaries with certain HP raid controllers, despite that HP certifies servers with them for Debian, and Debian and Ubuntu both list those servers as suitable. The result isn't obvious until your partitions go bye-bye when a write expects the partition boundary not to come before the cylinder boundary.

And then there was the OpenSSL bug where a Debian maintainer removed the randomizer. So there are weaknesses in Debian, but do they compare with rpm hell, or with the many adventures with Red Hat's aggressive patching of its kernels? If you're running Red Hat and compile your own generic kernels, that's not a problem. With Red Hat you really should. With Ubuntu I haven't yet had a problem running their kernel versions.