Shuttleworth Says Canonical Is Not Cash-Flow Positive

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Shuttleworth Says Canonical Is Not Cash-Flow Positive

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 30, 2008 @03:02AM from the can't-say-i'm-surprised dept.

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."

13 of 304 comments (clear)

Of course they should concentrate on the server by jcookeman · 2008-10-30 03:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Of course they should concentrate on the server by Markspark · 2008-10-30 03:33 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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!
2. Re:Of course they should concentrate on the server by Legion_SB · 2008-10-30 03:36 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
  
  --
  'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
3. Re:Of course they should concentrate on the server by apodyopsis · 2008-10-30 04:35 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
Really by Anarke_Incarnate · 2008-10-30 03:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

What do they have to offer, besides the .deb repositories and less long term support, than Novell/SUSE and Red Hat or Oracle cannot do now?
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.
1. Re:Really by EagleRock · 2008-10-30 03:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I think Canonical hit the ground running with Ubuntu Desktop, since it tried to bring Linux to the masses with easy GUI tools and whatnot. The problem is that Ubuntu's strengths don't carry over to Ubuntu Server, especially when you deal with SysAdmins that know what they're doing. Their only strength is that they're based off of Debian, which you can get with, well, Debian. You can tell that they are trying to tout ease-of-use with their default LAMP install out-of-the-box, but that's already been done years ago, and they just don't have the advanced server options that Novell or RedHat have for their enterprise solutions. I appreciate them trying, but their methodologies are doomed to fail.
  
  --
  How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?
The server version? by stinerman · 2008-10-30 03:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:The server version? by dsginter · 2008-10-30 03:27 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Hasn't this gone full circle?
  No - the predominant attitude in the industry is "if you don't like it, then fork it" - so they did. Why did they do it? I think that you answered it yourself with the very next sentence:
  The Debian release cycle is too long and uncertain so out comes Ubuntu.
  When you see how the mirrors are getting slammed right now (8.10 is on most of them), you simply must realize that Ubuntu has stolen most of the mindshare aware from Debian. Is that not good?
  
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  More
... and bless him by TheMeuge · 2008-10-30 03:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Focus on one more.... by Lumpy · 2008-10-30 03:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Linux is for suckers by MrNaz · 2008-10-30 03:35 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

--
I hate printers.
Re:Hands Down by Nevyn · 2008-10-30 04:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

A single major advantage: It's Debian-based, but more current, better honed

"more current" in relation to Debian stable, maybe. In relation to the competition it is always subjective, given that RHEL/CentOS have 7+ year support lifetimes. I don't think anyone has done a "newness" and "correctness" metric for LTS vs. RHEL ... my guess is that they are about equal at GA.

but deb package management is far better than Red Hat's rpm, and that can be a huge advantage.

This is hard to qualify statement, rpm is a super set of dpkg and it's hard to argue that yum is anything but a superset of apt-get (in terms of features, UI and speed). You could probably argue that Debian packaging is stricter than Fedora/RHEL/EPEL, mostly due to the above (which also means it's harder on the packager, but somewhat easier on the tools). Maybe you just mean that Debian/Ubuntu "offically support" apt-get dist-upgrade, whereas Fedora/RHEL/CentOS don't, yet, for various reasons ... which while valid is much less so in a real company setting, IMO.

So there are weaknesses in Debian, but do they compare with rpm hell,

I can only assume that you haven't used rpm/yum recently ... or that you have seen cases where bad external packages are imported into rpm case but not in the dpkg case (as the resulting dpkg hell is often much worse).

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.

I can only assume this is some kind of weird joke, or maybe you are trolling. Ubuntu is infamous for kludging their kernels and not working upstream ... and personally if you are not running the distro. kernel on RHEL then you might as well set fire to your money instead.

--
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
Re:Hands Down by Tekfactory · 2008-10-30 04:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't want to start an argument, but
Have you tried Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS lately?
Package Management through Yum, or the Package Manager is easy to use, works fine and is much easier than loading individual packages through Rpm and divining dependencies on your own.
I assume you problems with Rpm are with the package installation program and not the file format itself.
The weirdest problem I have had lately was uninstalling Samba ripped Nautilus off a system, and my Desktop icons disappeared. Reinstalling Nautilus fixed the problem, and also re-loaded some tiny piece of Samba it thinks it needs.