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.'"

Comments

It's revenue

[LingNoi]

The article clearly describes it as revenue.

Canonical also receives revenue from companies like Dell that ship computers with Ubuntu and work with it on software engineering projects like adding Linux-based features to laptops. All told, Canonical's annual revenue is creeping toward $30 million, Mr. Shuttleworth said.

That figure won't worry Microsoft.

But Mr. Shuttleworth contends that $30 million a year is self-sustaining revenue, just what he needs to finance regular Ubuntu updates. And a free operating system that pays for itself, he says, could change how people view and use the software they touch everyday.

Re:Ubuntu moves faster

[Aladrin]

Maybe because, until very very recently, it was totally free to develop in .NET but you had to pay to develop commercial programs in QT? In fact, not long ago, even open source Windows programs in QT required fees. (Linux ones were free.)

Blame QT for that, not the developers.

Re:Marketing MIA

[wrecked]

I wonder how hard it would be to make it possible to do links in a browser that install packages. Of course, you would need the appropriate messages and user interaction, but, say you could have an instruction page that says: Install [Apache] [PHP5] [MySQL]. The user clicks on Apache in their browser, it opens a package manager, and prompts them to confirm they actually want to install it.

It's been done; Klik is your answer. From the Wikipedia article:

klik does not "install" software in the traditional sense (i.e., it does not put files all over the place in the system). It uses one .cmg file per application. Each one is self-contained: it includes all libraries the application depends on and that are not part of the base system. In this regard, it is similar to "application virtualization". One can klik a file even if they are not a superuser, or they are using a live CD.

klik is integrated with web browsers on the user's computer. Users download and install software by typing a URL beginning with klik://. This downloads a klik "recipe" file, which is used to generate the .cmg file. In this way, one recipe can be used to supply packages to a wide variety of platforms.

Re:Marketing MIA

[spectro]

Not everyone wants to have to fuck with xorg.conf just to get multiple displays working. Hell I don't, but you still have to, even in Ubuntu.

That's no longer true with 8.10. Just installed it from scratch in new hard drive and activating the second monitor was as easy as it is in windows.