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Ubuntu Linux Claims 12,000 Cloud Deployments
darthcamaro writes "The cloud is more than just hype for Ubuntu. Canonical COO Matt Asay is now saying that they can count 12,000 deployments of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. He also thinks the cloud is where Ubuntu can make money — because in his view, the company for the last five years wasn't set up to generate revenue. From the article: 'The conversion of non-paying to paying users is often a difficult ratio to report for any open source effort, and Ubuntu is no exception. Asay noted that Canonical plans to get more aggressive at tracking its free-to-paid ratio on Ubuntu Linux and its related services and technologies. "For the first five years of the company's life, it wasn't set up to make money," Asay said. "The company was set up to make a fantastic Linux distribution and other tools around it and get it out there and get people using it. That was the focus." That's now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to generating revenues.'"
If they start charging to get Ubuntu, then the balance tips back in favor of the defacto "standard" OS that everyone else uses.
They aren't charging people to install Ubuntu on their laptops. They're starting to charge people for support on Ubuntu server and for in the cloud services. The only way you'll be paying for Ubuntu on your desktop is if you need support or if you want to backup your machine online with Ubuntu.
This is a GPL product. If they were to start charging for a copy, one guy would buy it then give it away for free to everyone else. That's not much of a business model for anyone.
The community counts a lot. Also, popularity helps a lot, especially for a FLOSS project. When I go looking for walk-throughs or tutorials for some FLOSS application, Ubuntu is nearly always used as an example. Every distribution has its idiosyncrasies, which of course is why there are different distributions, so it makes life easier if the idiosyncrasies of the distribution you're using are specifically addressed.
There are some things I like about Fedora -- in general, that it's more conventional in several respects. Canonical is developing a habit of innovating first, documenting later, for important features -- take Upstart, for instance, which handles startup and shutdown processes.
I notice that I'll read sysadmins saying they like to use Ubuntu on their personal computers, but some other distribution on their servers, usually Debian or CentOS. One expects different things from different computers.
Plymouth originated as a RedHat technology, so expect to see it there too. Wouldn't be surprised to find it in the next Debian too--it's where everybody else is going. The ability to "degrade" back to simple text mode is supposed to be there. I expect that months from now, part of the standard set of tricks every Linux server admin knows will be how to force Plymouth into text mode. I believe this works:
plymouth-set-default-plugin text