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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.
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.
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.
Oh come on Mr. GNAA, you can do better than that. Jumpy Jigaboo? It even involves the next one up alphabetically.
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
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.
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.
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...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)
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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 "click" on "buy" right now.
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.