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Canonical Close To $30M Critical Mass; Should Microsoft Worry?
ruphus13 writes "Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, claims that the company is very close to the $30M mark, at which point, they will be a self-sustaining company. While people feel that this should not worry Microsoft, the real question is whether a 10,000 person effort on a failure like Vista can actually be the paradigm of a long-term strategy. From the article: 'Microsoft had 10,000 people [the article is unclear whether these were all developers, or administrative and support staff were factored in] working on Vista for a five year period ... huge profits in any given year can mean relatively little five years on. Canonical's self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening — but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft's development process really is.'"
Developer count is not what matters. Linux has plenty of great developers. Marketing is what's missing to Linux today.
Sadly, if you google "Ubuntu Marketing", you land on an empty page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/News). Maybe someone needs to update Google's index :-)
Everyone here knows that Linux has the technical goods to take on Windows. But the cheerleading is missing. Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
So yes, Ubuntu being sustainable is a step in the right direction.
--
FairSoftware.net -- jobs for geeks by geeks
Something about some guy starting a new job in Washington, DC? I saw something about it on TV.
That's what will kill Microsoft (and why I believe Ubuntu has become one of the top distros). Everytime I hear about Microsoft management story, it seems to be an exercise in bureacracy.
But what will hurt Microsoft is the day Quicken or Photoshop have Wine 1.xx on their system requirements, next to XP/Vista/Etc. I'm too cynical to think they'll come out with native Linux version, but eventually they'll want to tap into the 10 million+ users of Ubuntu and other Linuxes, if nothing else but to stop their competition from taking hold.
At this point, there isn't much reason to not be OS agnostic for those type of programs.
The real culprit here is Microsoft's full acceptance of Agile as a valid development methodology. While for small projects, or projects that can be delivered to a real-world testing environment (like web applications) Agile works great, for large applications with many individual teams working on disparate parts of the system, Agile is simply no match for the classic Waterfall methodology.
You don't get singleness of purpose and unity of design by letting each team work out their parts on their own. That requires architecture and design and a top-down approach.
Expect to see Microsoft move back towards tried and true development methodologies. Many of their smaller projects will probably stick with Agile, but the large products (Windows, Office, etc) will no doubt move back to Waterfall.
$30 million? That's it? That's nothing. That's a regular grocery store. I'll check back when this number is about 100 times bigger...
Only if one ignores all the sales of commercial and support contracts. Otherwise, it's pretty sustainable. A better question might be "How effective is it?".
Caveat Utilitor
The biggest contributor to the LACK of office productivity since the invention of desktop computers.
Microsoft User: A desktop computer user who replicates their industriousness with paper and pencil with software.
Cordially,
Kilgore Trout
What do you want for a company that gives its product away? I am honestly surprised they have any million...
They are close to the $30 Million dollar mark! Hooray!
Okay... is that gross sales? Net profit? Payroll? My guess is gross sales, but the summary doesn't say. Without that other piece of information, this summary makes ZERO sense (and you can put any unit you want after ZERO).
Hey, guys, my car goes from 0 to 120 in 3! That makes about as much sense as the summary.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
MSFT reported revenue of $60.4 billion dollars for 2008. That comes out to about $165.5 million per day.
There are reasons why Microsoft may or may not feel threatened by things like Linux. Maybe netbooks. But I doubt a $30M company scares them much. In fact, I'd say they're much more worried about RedHat than Canonical - not because of their size, but because RH and Microsoft do really compete in the server market. How many Linux notebooks has Dell sold so far? Even by the lowered standards of Vista there's simply no comparison there.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The problem is that Microsoft paid those 10K developers all themselves.
With linux, you have people who either want to contribute for free, or a wide number of companies that pay for development, which spreads the cost around.
A smaller company that is built on the greatness of others, but which it has found a niche for itself is far more likely to succeed than a massive company with tons of overhead that has to do much more to make money.
The power of linux is in the desire of the users to make it better, and in the massive number of people able to contribute (if MS opened up its source code, and made it free, I'm sure things would be much different).
I'd love to have a 'failure' like Vista!
and Thimothy is a moron for suggesting it
Just like RedHat took off in its own direction, after being the darling Linux distro some years ago, eventually perhaps Canonical will see the same writing on the wall and abandon the focus on the Linux desktop. The money is in servers and support contracts, the Ubuntu consumer desktop serves to give a distribution a foothold, to give it eyeballs, to focus developer attention on it. But if Ubuntu is to truly become a business it needs to be a whole lot more than self-sustaining.
I also second comments that $30 million is nothing in terms of revenue. There are thousands of small businesses that do that kind of revenue every year, and yet we don't ask if MS is worried about XYZ business.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
...and why would Microsoft worry? Background, please.
And that's the problem -- people think a product or service has to make tons of $$ to be successful. Something like Ubuntu subverts our capitalist assumptions, because it actually gets cheaper the better it gets, and the more people who use it. Supply and demand work differently.
How sustainable Microsoft's development process really is? Vista, for all it's faults, and there are plenty of them (truckloads), still sells more in a quarter than Canonical will sell in a lifetime. And that developmental process is producing Windows 7 64, which is actually quite stable. A Linux company finally crawls out of the primordial soup, good news, but in terms of marketshare, Microsoft is civilization 5,000 years hence.
Man, I wish I had a penny each time a slashdotter predicts Microsofts demise ;)
They had a source code tree that's just over fifteen years old, with bits that go back some twenty five years. Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch. There's kind of a difference, don't you think? So comparing Canonical's $30m/yr cash flow and small staffing to Microsoft's multi-billion/yr cash flow and tens of thousands of staff members is invalid because the two aren't comparable. Apples-Oranges, to use a cliche.
Those 10,000 developers at MS probably spent more than 30 million just on coffee and donuts in the past year.
If you remember a while back I said something like: There will never be a year of Linux, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that there is never a 'the last year of Linux or 'the Final year of Linux'. The fear never leaves the back of my mind that there will be a day coming when either Jobs or Ballmer or some US politician like Orin Hatch says 'If you are a Linux user, we will come find you, man, woman, child or company. You will use Windows pr you will pay fines, you will go to jail.'
This whole 30 Million, if its true, could mean Linux is here to stay, at least for a while. It could mean that we will continue to see at least a steady development of Linux games and applications. So Linux may hold on if we can for one thing, find a way to keep from losing any more important programmers, while at the same time attracting new talent. An example of this that hits close to home for me is the announcement Pixel would be leaving. I'm a Mandriva contributor. I'm worried about what will happen to Mandriva without Pixel.
So, again, don't celebrate just yet.
What people should care about is that Canonical is getting successful and they are doing so not because they are paying people to take the products, but because people want the products.
So this is great news regardless of what Microsoft thinks. They, Microsoft, have never thought about anything but destroying what others have created so they may maintain their monopoly. Go Ubuntu! Go Canonical!
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
>Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch
I think IBM (OS/2 or Windows NT), BSD (IP stack until just lately), Seattle Computer Products (MS-DOS nee Q-DOS), SpyGlass (iexplore.exe, part of the OPERATING SYSTEM according to MS) , among others would strongly disagree.
How much money does MS have in the bank?
Sorry, but that is not a failure in my eyes. They may have wasted money by not maximizing their profits. They may have a development cycle that is flawed, but by no means are they not able to tweak it.
You have to be kidding me.
How much source code from Q-DOS do you think still remains in the Windows NT tree? The only portion of BSD that I'm aware of that was - at one time - used for NT 3.51 and 4.0 was the IP stack. Which is a pretty dinky part of the kernel, never mind the entire OS tree. SpyGlass wrote a little web browser that could render no more than HTML 1.0 back in the day - how much of that do you think still remains in Internet Explorer 7?
Get a grip.
The article clearly describes it as revenue.
setting up a Mac, and works as smoothly and as well, with consistent key shortcuts across all commands, a copy/paste that works simply and effectively, a working photo management system that comes bundled that can import my iPhoto collection, and never needs the terminal to ever write a script to do something slightly oddball, then Linux will have a shot.
Every time I've tried Linux, it was only good enough to get about 2/3 of what I wanted, then it became frustrating. Interoperation with Windows, setting up SMB sharing, network logins, etc always became a level of frustration.
Someday someone will get a unified Linux, with all of this sorted, however today is not the day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.
From that alone, you can tell he reads slashdot.
The second best quote from TFA:
Kudos on reaching the self-sustainable mark Mr. Shuttleworth! Let's hope you really do make the world a better, more free, place.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Assuming that Microsoft has 100K employees, that 30Mil is less than amount that MS pays daily... its employees.
But the cheerleading is missing.
I laugh in the face of a Linux cheerleader, for he is ill equipped.
:D
That's right, our side's got freaking Evangelists.
I dare you to find a more epic term to describe your purveyors of software
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
There are hundreds of other competing sources doing a better job. /. should rather stick to what it can do well.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You make a good point that it is very little.
However, I think the good news is that Canonical is now breaking even which means Mark doesn't have to keep shovelling his personal money into it to keep it all working.
It also means if Mark is hit by a bus (hopefully not) then Canonical won't die from lack of funding.
MS will not be toppled any time soon. very long term they will, because all companies die at some point.
The vast majority of end users don't know the difference between XP and Vista or that Vista was some kind of failure. They bought their computer and whatever it has is what they use. Only geeks know/think that Vista was a failure. It was only a PR failure. If it was a real failure new PCs would not be shipping with it.
Currently and for the foreseeable future almost every PC ships with an MS OS. That is the key, people do not decide which OS to run, the vendors do.
The only way that Linux is going to take off is if a vendor produces some must have pc/appliance/etc that runs Linux. I thought the netbook might be it, but now I know several people that have them and they all got the XP version.
Something like Ubuntu subverts our capitalist assumptions, because it actually gets cheaper the better it gets, and the more people who use it.
Uhm, isn't this the default market behavior in IT when you pay for features (and not brands like Apple or Microsoft)?
Numbers are totally irrelevant, or at least their magnitude is. The point is that Canonical is self-sustaining. Last time I checked, Mr Shuttleworth did not need the cash to mend his shoes, he wanted to make something that was good.
When Canonical becomes self-sustaining, he will have accomplished that goal. This means development will be funded, marketing efforts will be ongoing, and with luck, people will make money.
This means that if you like and use Ubuntu, it will be there in the future. I do for both, so this is very good.
The more money it makes, given their structure, the more development and marketing they will be able to do. I don't know the financial structure of Canonical, but I doubt the people with a piece of it are more interested in money than changing the world. That likely means the people who own it will dump the majority of anything over the $30M back into the distro.
If you see what they did with $30M, imagine what an extra $10M can do?
This is a good thing.
-Charlie
Sales is the issue. The adverts do little without Sales closing deals.
Ubuntu needs enough sales capital to spend on the hookers and blow required to close large deals. If they start eating Microsoft's lunch, then there will be, most likely, a litigation carpet bombing by one or more of Microsoft's proxies.
What's Mark's next move though? Will he try to take it public? At some point, Ubuntu will "jump the shark." Thank Dog for Debian.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
Marketing isn't just advertising and promotion. It is also the act of determining what kind of product a particular target market desires. The reason why linux isn't on the desktop is because it doesn't get something right that other OSes and platforms for that particular target market. If the target market is "desktop users" then I say desktop users don't care about what is running under the hood, they only care that their apps and their devices work.
In my opinion, the correct marketing strategy for a desktop linux distro would be:
And no, the correct answer is not "use gimp" or "use openoffice" or "don't buy ipods". If you want to sell linux, you need to offer them something that meets the customer's needs. All I hear when open source devs say "use openoffice" is the same as forcing openoffice down their throat. Instead, the first question any good salesman asks of any customer is "what do you need?" If they then answer "I need to use itunes for my iphone" then you better get linux to work with itunes and their iphone otherwise your product is not for that customer!
Notice that I never specified how one would get devices like iphones and MS Office and such to work. One could strike an agreement with the manufacturers to release drivers, apps, and such or maybe outline a standard that manufacturers can build and work with. But guess what, that means a new marketing strategy for a new customer. In this case you're going to have to make it easier for the companies (the new target market) to make more money either by sharing the workload or offering them something that benefits them.
Unfortunately, things like the GPL and even the nature of linux limit the choices in marketing strategies (as well as the one-sidedness many FOSS advocates have). But remember, the customer is king; if you can't give them what they want, they will never be your customer.
On a side note: I've always felt that FreeBSD had a better chance for being a good base for a desktop OS simply because of licensing. Example: the FreeBSD camp has always had madwifi available with no licensing issues while the linux camp has only recently gotten some fully supported madwifi drivers without tainting the kernel. But of course in a desktop environment, I have no problem with companies providing proprietary drivers. If their product doesn't work, it goes back to the store. In a corporate environment, I do have everything against proprietary software but that is because the needs of a company (different target market) are different from the needs of a home user. If that hint wasn't big enough, I was pointing out that while linux might not be for the home desktop user, it might be better suited for the corporate office user. Get MS Office working and you've probably met most cubicle worker needs.
Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corporation
contains no less than 240 footnotes as of today. Then of course there is some BSD licensed code in there.
I remember this girl in one of my computer science classes (no, not "the girl", it was almost 50:50 at this small private Wisconsin College). At the start of the semester she declared her "dream" was to develop new technologies at microsoft. I remember thinking she didn't know anything, because microsoft develops virtually nothing serious, anything interesting came from acquisitions.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
...as long as Windows is the OS that everybody wants to use because it runs on their system, any development process is sustainable.
Vista, for all its perceived faults was a massive step forward for the Windows architecture. Yes, it had sucky bits that people didn't like, but on the whole (and going forward), the changes were for the better.
Just remember that Windows NT was pretty poor when it first came out too, as was OSX. Windows 7 looks to be shaping up quite well (at least in terms of popular reception, even if it's not much different), which Microsoft must be thankful for.
It also probably cost significantly less than Vista to produce.
Interesting though, that the most popular Linux distro right now according to distrowatch is headed by a billionaire.
Money talks, even in open-source/free world. I doubt Ubuntu would be where it is today if Shuttleworth had to work at [insert company here] to earn a living.
I'm not saying it's BAD. I'm saying that success is generally dependent on funding, whether you're talking open source software or commercial software.
And why should MS care about them?
'each subsidiary should have a method to track Linux threats and that these should be reported back to Redmond'
link
link
link>
davecb5620@gmail.com
Why?
Would there be any point to it?
'The LDS Church .. are considering Mandrake, Debian, Red Hat and Open Office'
davecb5620@gmail.com
LOL!
I cannot believe someone is seriously asking this question. If Microsoft is going to worry about Linux vendor, it's going to be Red Hat, not Canonical.
This whole 30 Million, if its true, could mean Linux is here to stay, at least for a while.
And Red Hat/Novell's much larger/stable businesses mean....?
Unless you mean Linux aimed at the desktop, since Red Hat and Novell are primarily server companies and Microsoft is...not.
the retarded Apple posts or the retarded Linux posts? Shit, I'd rather read something directly about Vista at this point. snnnnore.
Does this mean it is time to start looking for a new distro to replace Ubuntu, since Canonical is so obviously intent on joining the mainstream corporate universe???
Everyone forgets about Mono.
That's exactly why an opensource marketplace doesn't have the same direct correlation between big payroll and big install-base. Despite all the comparisons people are making, Ubuntu doesn't have to make billions to be a threat to Microsoft's gravy train.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Dupes? Typos?
You're missing the point -- Microsoft _didn't_ write their code base from scratch. (not that anyone ever entirely does)
To get a little more offtopic - spyglass sold their code base to MS for a cut of sales, MS couldn't afford to write their own because MS was in a hurry to catch up to Netscape and prevent the Netscape server from being a development platform. Anyway, MS saw that they could beat down Netscape by offering IE for free (most browsers were sold back then, or you got it from your ISP, who paid wholesale for it) so they started giving IE way. Then they told Spyglass "here's that percent of nothin' we owe ya -> $0.00". That kind of company, I don't want to do business with.
If this is a joke, it's some sly humor. Let me break this down: Ubuntu, the biggest most important figure in the home linux community is almost breaking even... at only $30 million? That's peanuts. Even Xandros is profitable!
This would be a tremendous deal if they had more market share than say... Mac. Then they'd be undercutting their competition, kicking ass and taking names. Meanwhile in reality, Ubuntu has finally gotten some mainstream coverage when a girl in Wisconsin accidentally bought a computer with it and couldn't understand how to get her internet working or write documents... and the community assaulted her like a bunch of maniacs. Her experience with this "easy to use" version of linux was so bad that she thought Dell was trying to put over some sort of scam on her. The local news anchor described the system as "low profile"-- and he's in a college town. You know what happened when a local man in Seattle complained about Vista not working with his printer? They sent a Microsoft engineer to go help him. This is why Ubuntu is not ready for the mainstream- because their "community support" ideal is a rat's nest of dipshits who are working out of religious passion.
How do we know it hasn't peaked? That this is just how many people there are out there who are willing to deal with an unsupported amateurish user experience where you get assaulted by a horde of zealots when you need help?
All this time, Microsoft has been parasailing on the heap of flames that Vista has become, releasing a beta for a new OS that is garnering more positive buzz than Ubuntu or Mac OS X Snow Leopard- and that's from the mainstream media as well.
I have a feeling this may be the end of a giant arc for the linux community as the venture capital dries up in the wake of the economic collapse and large companies can no longer afford to throw money at useless userland projects. Once the companies give up and the community is in charge again, it's back to directionless shit.
Wake me up when ubuntu breaks... let's say 1%. How about when they're profitable? Because this is nothing but grim news considering the state of their system.
Ubuntu just isn't KISS enough.
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid
I am an Ubuntu fan, but it still lacks some simplicity of a default WinXP layout:
One Task Bar.
Blue Color (none of my clients like brown or orange).
jackd, pulse, ALSA, etc.... Seriously?
And lacks some real games out of the box, which is ridiculous, since:
Urban Terror
Zsnes
Mupen
and a host of other free games run so well.
Also key features that make Ubuntu > Windows (Compiz, etc) are missing out of the box. If you are going to have compiz (which is awesome! Good plan!), then there should be compiz config manager out of the box.
These issues coupled with a lack of decent FLASH for watching Youtube in Firefox.....
I switched back to WinXP. My machine runs faster, and without as much hacking. EVEN THOUGH I have to search for drivers and junk on initial install (which Ubuntu does much better!).
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
When is the IPO?
I was just wondering how they make money? Is it just from support? or Merchandise (ha)? or sales (does anyone really pay for a free operating system...I know I at one point saw an ubuntu cd for sale at circuit city or best buy or something, but really...)
It's great that Canonical is doing well but I would argue that Ubuntu has considerably more than 10000 developers. A huge chunk of Ubuntu's work is or was done by Debian and below Debian is the thousands of developers mostly working for free. That's a massive mostly volunteer effort that needs to be factored in before you can say how great Canonical is.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Though this isn't entirely their fault, the 8.10 release of Kubuntu has KDE 4, which thus far is a complete clusterf*ck. It is a "Vista" experience in Linux. They have to avoid these in the future
I know everyone on Slashdot loves all things Linux and Ubuntu, but even with the unhappiness over Vista's release, Microsoft will regain market share with Windows 7.
While geeks love punching in obscure command-line code and scouring repositories for oddly named software, average computer users don't like these things. Average users want to put a disc in or download a file and then click Next, Next, and Finish to complete installing the software or drivers.
Until installing software or drivers is this easy, and until the available software has names that make some sense (e.g., the GIMP versus Photoshop--you tell me which is the image editor based on name), Windows will trump Linux, regardless of the amount of money Canonical brings in.
I had personal friends who were fucked over by the Stacker imbroglio. I'm well aware of Microsoft's anticompetitive and criminal business tactics. But leftovers from that era at MS are still a very small part of the entire source-code tree that is Windows. I don't really like Windows. I don't use it. I don't much care for Microsoft as a business.
But the assertion that Canonical has somehow found a better business model than Microsoft's because they hire fewer developers and have a smaller gross income than Microsoft and - yet - also sell an entire OS like MS does is utterly ridiculous at its face.
Yet more stupid Slashdot crap that offers no insight into the problems of maintaining a large tree, and even less insight on the business and logistics problems of managing a large project and many developers. That's the real underlying discussion here. And nobody is having that discussion because Slashdot is filled with a bunch of fucking kids who want to spend their time finding reasons to hate Microsoft.
One needn't have much reason to dislike Windows. It's a piece of shit. We all know that already. But that doesn't mean that some random Linux distribution based off of a huge free development project with decades of history, is in any way comparable with a private internally developed product. It's not. And to argue that MS doesn't do any internal software development is idiotic at its face.
Just as I knew friends at Stacker at one time, so do I know a few devs at Microsoft. They work their asses off writing code.
Seriously... fire up firefox, google a software package, click the link to the .deb file, it opens a dialog asking what you want to do with it - select to open it with your package manager, it installs...
Poof.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Computer people know about Linux, but I talk to people all the time that say they have never heard of Linux. This in Silicon Valley! People at Berkley, San Jose State, Santa Cruz; I frequent Coffee Bars often, and will be discussing Linux and people will come up to me and be like "I couldn't help but over hear... what are you talking about?". This is where I wish I kept Ubuntu CD's on me more often, but I will actually spell 'LINUX' for them. I give a little speech about community development and sharing, and people working together for a common good and such, and many leave very interested. But, this is actually a pretty regular thing.
I think many of us forget that as much as people may use computers, and as much as the internet may be integrated into their lives, they are not "computer people". Just like has been mentioned here man times, just because we drive cars doesn't make us motorheads. I am not a car person, and I know lots of people that don't do more than fill their gas tank when the gas light comes on, and know the brake is on the left, throttle on the right. It "just works".
This is where it gets a little tough. Non linux people hear the fanboyism and it becomes annoying quickly as we have all heard it many many times, but these same people run into non-computer people all the time and give the same memorized speech. Foe those hearing it for the first time can be inspired. It takes that kind of work to get new people involved.
There are some great commercials, but marketing to non-computer people still has a long way to go. Marketing is about name recognition. We have these stupid commercials all the time that talk nothing about their product, but just get their name out there. No one can buy your product if they have never heard of you. Maybe the simplest way to put it is that the lowest common denominator is generally the largest pool yo can ever draw from. It takes everyone knowing your name before much anything can happen. Linux has dominated technology because tech people are always seeking new solutions to problems (at least those that survive). I think Linux has always been very much about enabling users to take power of their machines, but Linux is also about software freedom and a culture of sharing, however that sharing is rooted in the first part that many people just can't care about any more than drivers want to know more about their car. It is a tough battle, but (sadly in a way) very much of it is just going to have to be making people aware of their choices, and until they "get it", or don't, a big selling point is "it is free, and if you use it, believe us that we appreciate it.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Maybe her plan was to start her own company and wave the white flag at Microsoft after she designed the killer app.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
...but how many PCs sold this year didn't have it pre-installed.
Now there's Windows 7 which is "Vista, but finished". I'd say Microsoft haven't got anything to worry about - they're not competing on a level field.
No sig today...
And where will Linux be when the current contributors and coders of the popular packages included in most distros have upped and gone? Already many projects have come to a complete stop with more set to follow as development is left to a handful of programmers.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
It is both true that Microsoft has engaged in numerous anti-competitive business practices, has bought out numerous technologies that they then either killed or rebranded and resold, and they even broke some laws in the process - as proved in US district court. But all that could be true and still your point is irrelevant. Because staff engineers at Microsoft have also written a hell of a lot of source code. Microsoft also has hired many top CS professors and academics. There's a pile of brains in that place, most of which are used inefficiently. That's bureaucracy.
But there's no way in hell that Canonical - with a few random employees and a dinky $30M/yr gross, can compete with a behemoth like Microsoft. They can't. Perhaps the entire Linux community can, but Canonical hasn't hired the "Linux community" and doesn't pay them.
Again: the article and this synopsis offers Slashdot readers a ridiculous and thoroughly useless comparison between the two. As such, it's at best a bad strawman argument. At worst, yet another example of Slashdot swirling down the drain.
This place used to be filled with smart folks. Now it just makes smart folks yet more stupid. This place has become a brain sink.
This could happen sooner than you expect
This sentence, which I, being me, have written, appears to have several, superfluous, comma's.
It needs context. A grocery store with 30M gross sales but 50M costs, not so good. I assume the importance of that value is that it is close to becoming profitable on its own, and that is always an important step, no matter if it is $1k or $500M.
Not bad when you can base your company off of massive amounts of work someone else did at no cost to you (or your company), and your group just adds some window dressing to it.
>What do you think has happened since then has caused people to lose so much intelligence?
*People* started to use computers, instead of tech droids with horn-rimmed thick glasses.
Of course money talks. Shuttleworth hired a hell of a lot of competent developers to make Ubuntu shine from the very start. Anyone who thinks success doesn't need funding is stupid and should be ignored.
What's far more interesting is that Ubuntu was started by a billionaire who managed to hire damn near the everyone who ever served on the Debian Technical Board, and knew why it was important. In contrast, Michael Robertson took the same Debian base and shat out "Lindows", who's primary contribution was to charge money for Free Software.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Meanwhile, the guys over at EFDA have almost got there too... http://www.efda.org/fusion_energy/fusion_research_today.htm
Online i totally prefer command line based guides. Because i can read the English language pretty well and understand everything, but i have no idea how all the menus are called in English!
This is why before i tried to get English versions of Windows: The translation to German was sometimes pretty weird. E.g. the English version had "Add/Remove" and the German one used "Software" (!!!) for the same thing. So i could sometimes follow guides using an English interface.
Now, i can use an interface in my own language and use guides from any language on the commandline. Isn't that amazing?
There should be a macro recording system that walks through GUI config stuff, independent from the language the GUI is translated to and the current position of buttons on screen.
People could download these macro files and watch the mouse move.
Otherwise, all tutorials will have to be translated into loads of languages.
Ideally, this macro format should be human readable and display its source and what will happen next.
Because blindly following GUI instructions is as dangerous as copying sudo rm -rf / to the terminal.
WIthout Debian Canonical wouldn't exist.
So even with 30m they still are not truly 'self supporting'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you really want ubuntu to win the os popularity contest, all you need to do is market it with free porn. No multinational will be able to compete with you, and you'll widen the demographic whilst connecting with those already hooked on linux.
No it doesn't.
The volunteer developer on a major project is most likely a minor contributor or being subsidized by his employer.
When his boss is short on money and patience the developer goes back to working for a living.
The client OS and the client app is not fundamentally about understanding the code - it is about understanding the user.
The way he thinks, the world he inhabits.
This demands mastery of many disciplines and it is not - and never will be - a part-time job.
This is where corporations with deep, deep, resources like Apple and Microsoft can hammer you into the ground.
10,000 people * 40 hours per week * 50 weeks per year * 5 years = 100,000,000 man hours. If a dev earns, say, $36 per hour, then this is $3.6 Billion just to run the workforce. Factor in other costs such as benefits, insurance, social security contribution matching, etc., and you've got a good $4 to $5 Billion spent to develop Vista. If it's true that Vista fell short of its sales goals, that is an enormous loss.
Why do people care who runs GNU/Linux and who does not? GNU/Linux marketshare is abysmal and still the community is pulling in support from hardware and software vendors, which is great!
What I don't get is this whole "PLEASE RUN LINUX!"-shit. Who cares? So, run Mac OS or Windows, good on ya. As long as we've got open standards, it doesn't make any difference at all what operating system you run on your computer. Frankly, it's mostly boring, in the end.
GNU/Linux is a CHOICE and that's enough for me.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
They did it from scratch. Had the opportunity to make something truly great... and fucked it up.
And as for the 15/25 year old elements of the source code tree:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I like Linux and all, but I've been running Win 7 for the past week or so, and while still buggy in places, it's a VAST improvement over Vista. I hated Vista, and I love Win7.
You had two years of "Vista failure" to gain traction in the market. You have failed.
And before you jump on my throat and say "what have you done to help", I'll tell you that I haven't done anything, and I'm not demanding anything. I'm just stating the fact. I only use Linux on the server, it requires too much manual labor to run on a laptop. And by "run" I mean suspend and wake up, use wireless, support all hardware, etc.
Heck, you even failed to beat Mac OS X on the desktop, in spite of Apple daring to charge money for it.
...when you leach from other peoples' hard work.
So, it depends on what you have for a video card, and may or may not work? Sounds effective.
" Canonical's self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening â" but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft's development process really is." The summary is saying that Canonical is almost sustainable as it approaches $30 million (with an M) yet then wonders how sustainable Microsoft is, with its income in the 17 Billions (with a B)? (17B from the sale of Windows) So lets see, according to the article MS has 10,000 Windows employees bringing in $17B, or 1.7M apiece. Canonical has 200 employees with revenue of $30M or about 150,000 per employee. So a company is 10 times more profitable, but is less sustainable?
From where I'm sitting -- in front of an Ubuntu desktop -- the two are very comparable. They both facilitate the same tasks, they both run on the same hardware. The fact that one company has to put tens of thousands of developers on the payroll to do it, and the other almost certainly has fewer than 200 total employees is very telling.
Linux isn't going anywhere. Neither is Microsoft. But the economics of Linux are such that, at any moment, they could suddenly find their share of the OS market drop by ten or twenty percent. For a company that makes tens of billions in annual revenues from Windows, that has to be worrying.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'd be impressed if you were typing that on a VT-100 connected to your VAX 11/750 running real BSD 4.3. I'd be even more impressed if you had installed it, because doing so by manually imputing the boot loader from the front panel and installing off of tape was a real fucking pain the ass.
Speaking as one who has actually done it.
As for your point that Ubuntu can be compared to Windows ... sure. But that ignores my point that the comparison between the two development models is invalid. Because the article and summary does not compare Windows with Ubuntu, it compares Canonical's business model with Microsoft's. And then draws the idiotic conclusion that somehow what Canonical is more efficient and cheaper than Microsoft's development model. Mr. Strawman, please meet Mr. False Analogy.
Want to make a reasonable comparison? Try Apple with Microsoft. Or DEC with Microsoft. Or Sun with Microsoft. Or SGI with Microsoft. All of whom wrote significant portions of their own operating systems, and all of whom kicked Microsoft's technical asses. And the Linux community's as well.
If I had to choose between Linux and Irix or Linux and VMS - I'd take Irix or VMS any freak'n day of the year. Linux is a piece of junk.
First!
Or you could do iterative releases and make changes and add features as people demonstrate a desire for them.
It's not that I disagree with your post - I agree that a lot of FOSS could use some help with their user interfaces and with improving "user friendliness" in general - but I think you might be accidentally focusing on what it takes to successfully launch commercial/proprietary software.
For proprietary software, the product has to be polished and "finished" out of the box. If users perceive it to be missing features or less than "user friendly," they will curse your company for selling a crappy product and walk away to one of your competitors, possibly never to return.
Contrast that with FOSS.
If I download and try out alpha or beta quality software (probably explicitly labeled as such), I might decide it's too rough for me or is lacking key features. But since it was "free as in beer", I can't really hold a grudge and might keep it around just because I can. Even if I give up on it for the time being, there's no reason to hold a grudge, so I might come back and start using it after the developers have had more time to work on it. "Free as in speech" means that more users means more feedback and more developers, creating a positive feedback loop.
That's the real strength of FOSS, and the reason that Microsoft has a reason to fear it. You can't kill an open source project by putting one competing company out of business, and its collaborative nature means that there's nowhere for it to go but up.
This already works since Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) released over a year ago: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/AptUrl - just write a link that goes "apt:fortunes;frozen-bubble" instead of http://whatever/ and when an Ubuntu user clicks on this, it runs the equivalent of "apt-get install fortunes frozen-bubble". You can install any number of apps launched with a single click, and it's safe because they come from the repositories defined on the user's machine in /etc/apt/sources.list.
Time will tell
The worm that has the "open in Explorer" icon and "Open in a file view" text in the "execute program" dialog box section when autorun detects a removable device is inserted, then teaching everyone to click on "OK" when it tells you it needs admin privileges.
How is that different from your little titbit?
Yet we hear fuck all from you about how bad that is.
Why is that?
``I'm saying that success is generally dependent on funding, whether you're talking open source software or commercial software.''
Oh, absolutely. Dead coders can't write code. So you need to keep them alive one way or another: pay them to write code, or pay them for something else and leave them spare time to write code. I would have written more open source software last year if I had had more time. And the reason I don't have more time is that I need to work to pay the bills.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch.
Tell that to Xerox, IBM, NCSA, and many others.