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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.'"
Just when I was moving to Debian.
But... the future refused to change.
Canonical appears to be following the stereotypical free software business model: sell services to which the free software can connect. One of them is the online storage service Ubuntu One.
Ubuntu is a very nice starting distro to get into the knowledge of Linux. I'm glad they make it work as well as they have (in my experience I had minor issues between 9.04/9.10)
I hope they can find a way to make proper funding and really make improvements to the other flavors (KDE variant Kubuntu being sometimes quite broken)
So if it wasnt set up to make money for the last 5 years - but that time is over - what changes will we see?
Will the growth in cloud / corporate paid users be enough to make the company and quality of the distribution grow ala Red Hat (which some would argue pushed the focus on users to the side for corporate..)?
Or will the money not be enough and will start to put the crunch on Ubuntu - and what end user ramifications would that have?
Sorry nothing but questions here...
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Sustaining a project is definitely a Good Thing (tm). If there's no money in it, who's going to write BETTER software, rather than software that just kinda works? Go for it, Canonical! (Just don't become like a certain software "vendor" we all know)
The company was set up to make a fantastic Linux distribution ... That was the focus. ... ... That's now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to generating revenues.
My theory is that if the focus is generating revenues, not the customer (or the product), failure is to be expected in this case.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
So, they are going to make money on what?
According to Larry Ellison on water vapor.
I'm using Ubuntu right now, but a coworker told me he prefers Fedora (quote: "Any OS that fits on a single CD can't be any good."). Meanwhile my company is using Red Hat for their development.
What makes one Linux better than another?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
We're fine with moving priority to the new objective as soon as you've completed the former. ;-)
Ubuntu 10.04 presumably is not it just yet.
Packetmanager and base layout. The community also counts.
No thanks..
Zoid.com
Pure fanboyistic bullshit. If these people were reasoning their choices out, they would use Microsoft Windows 7, the finest operating system yet to come from Redmond. The pure joy of using Microsoft Windows 7 is a bargain at twice the price, I assure you. And security? Brother, let's not even talk about security. Microsoft Windows 7.
Both Fedora and Ubuntu have convenient package managers and an active community. Other differences are mainly a matter of taste.
Shuttleworth, as far as i can tell, never planned to make money with Canonical and Ubuntu. He's rich enough to subsidize the two indefinitely. So the fact that Ubuntu might now actually start to generate self-sustaining or even profitable revenues is extra credit, and always was. I think any future changes in the companies are still going to reflect the culture of emphasizing a good, widely deployed Desktop Linux rather than necessarily turning a profit.
If I were looking for paid support Linux, I would go with RHEL. They have more experience in this kind of thing and have been around longer. Plus, I like RHEL for enterprise use. It has good tools for use in the enterprise - a certificate management system, a good directory server, deployment tools, etc.
When Fedora first came out, I felt like Red Hat went out of their way to make fedora the "hobbiest" version, and RHEL the "corporate" version. Have they got more or less divergent as time has gone on? It's kind of nice to run the same version of the software at home and in the server room, where Ubuntu is Ubuntu is Ubuntu. One less thing to deal with. Just wondering if I should give Fedora another try...
Can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?
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.
It seems that a number of companies focus on long term profits as opposed to short term (like Amazon for example) so it doesn't surprise me that the last five years have not been chiefly about profit. I doubt they had their eyes on the cloud as a promising revenue stream back when they started up so the chance they are taking by adding it doesn't seem that great. I'd bet that they still have a longer view of how they could reach full profitability since they seem to have favored using their Ubuntu project to grow both the platform and the user base. That still seems to have potential payoffs deep into the future. They've gotten close but still need to grow the platform quite a bit in order to earn a large enough user base to make a difference. I know many people don't think it will happen but I would bet there is room for a third player in the OS market. So I would say a company of around 200 employees is small enough still that meager profits are sustainable for some time, as long as the vision and potential hold promise. Those aren't answers, but then my investment is only in time, and hobbies don't have to pay off.
I think any future changes in the companies are still going to reflect the culture of emphasizing a good, widely deployed Desktop Linux rather than necessarily turning a profit.
There could also be the fact that in many people's (and PHB's) eyes, if you don't pay through the nose for it then it has to be crap.
Hopefully a more commercial Ubuntu will help make it more visible in the corporate space as well as promote the integration of tools in that area (they're already there of course, you just have to add them yourself).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Why don't they just take a bunch of polls and ask if people use Ubuntu, and if they pay?
Or maybe they could make it so that paying ubuntu users get a slight bandwidth preference for update/distro packages --- but this actually means a very small flag is applied to their system. Those numbers can be counted.
What makes one Linux better than another?
Your needs and your tastes.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I'm using Ubuntu right now, but a coworker told me he prefers Fedora (quote: "Any OS that fits on a single CD can't be any good."). Meanwhile my company is using Red Hat for their development.
What makes one Linux better than another?
I say the same thing about programming languages. Any application that doesn't carry a runtime dependency of at least a few hundred megs can't be any good. That's why I use the .NET framework. Oh--I also hate freedom and kick puppies.
There's no place like
He might have meant using PHP (on slackware) to connect to MS SQL (on a windows box).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If you got MSSQL (Microsoft SQL server) running on Ubuntu, you are one talented mofo
My employer has one Linux server (currently running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) and one Windows server (running Windows Server 2003). When I tried to get a PHP program on the Ubuntu server to talk to the M$ SQL Server Express instance on the Windows server, all the ODBC driver would give me was "Failed to fetch error message".
Lots of people like to claim that "Free is a business model". In one sense I agree: Giving away some things for free so you can make money other ways can work. But free by itself is not a business model.
This is what Canonical has decided. After 5 years of trying to be successful in giving a way a free client operating system, they have decided to stop lighting money on fire and do something to make a profit.
I love this quote from the article:
TThe cynic in me - or as some would likely claim, the Microsoftie in me - sees that their path for the last five years has been a failure. They produced a client OS that is considered one of the best Linux client distributions. But beyond that - no success.
I suggest they will not be very successful here: For cloud computing - the value is not in the operating system itself, but in the cloud systems ability to scale economically: keeping operational costs super low.
It will be difficult for them to compete with Microsoft. We really do know how to run massive data centers at scale. More over, we eat our own dogfood and have a world class team of developers building our cloud products. Just how is canonical going to get this experience? They are very unlikely to go build a big data center.
They also will be competing with Google, IBM and Amazon (among others). These guys dont sell software with which to build a could, but they sell cloud services.
My predictions have nothing to do with the goodness of Linux - it is a very good OS and the people that build it are every bit as good as people at Microsoft, Google, Sun, Oracle and others. The challenges Canonical faces are operational, and business related.
Jibe!
If at first you don't succeed. Redefine success.
Anecdotally, I have intel graphics (reportedly always affected by the bug), I am running the test replacement from the PPA, and if I leave my machine sitting for any length of time I find it very hot and in text mode, often with a kernel panic. I've been updating once or twice daily...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
a coworker told me he prefers Fedora (quote: "Any OS that fits on a single CD can't be any good.").
I assume that quote is supposed to be from your coworker. Either your coworker never said that, or your coworker is an idiot. I have a Fedora 12 CD. The whole thing fit right on there, and the live session works perfectly. If your coworker really said that, tell him to switch distros, because by his own ideas, Fedora can't be any good.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
>>>An X.Org Server update that was pushed into the Lucid repository last week has resulted in the system being slower and slower as it is left on, until it reaches a point where the system is no longer usable
>>>
Thanks for the link. I was going to move from 8.1 to 10.0 next week, but I will wait another month 'til they fix it. I hate memory leaks. I remember when Firefox had that problem and gradually grew from ~100,000 to 600,000 KB until my computer became slow as a snail (drive swapping) or crashed. Opera 10 seems to have a similar problem. I hate leaks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A non-profit charity makes much more sense. Or maybe even seek NSF grants. It's nice having a viable, widely distributed Linux distro without a profit incentive.
that's why we have the gpl.
Web Design
If you want to see smoke and mirrors at its best, read the pdf article from Canonical that explains Introduction to Cloud Computing. It is all consuming, ever present and the holy grail but what it actually does, we don't know... The summary is the most laughable part..
The co-worker is using Fedora Core 5 or some other version that predates the Live CD version.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
We're fine with moving priority to the new objective as soon as you've completed the former. ;-)
Ubuntu 10.04 <a href="http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/2021247/Ubuntu-LTS-Experiences-Xorg-Memory-Leak">presumably</a> is not it just yet.</p></quote>
It's already been fixed.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/565981
What makes one Linux better than another?
In a nutshell:
At one point, you'll start using it. After some time, you'll stop using it. In between, the system that requires the smallest number of mouseclicks to make it do what you want, is the best. And for this measuring method, each commandline key-press counts as 10 mouseclicks (100 if you're a newbie).
*groan* I feel you. I am a sysadmin too and one of our marketing companies doing SEO decided to redo our largest clients websites.
Currently the clients sites are living on the win 2k3 server I administer (the only windows production server we still run) and they wanted to know if they did the sites in in PHP or Drupal on one of our existing Linux servers if they could still connect to the mssql backend on the windows server.
So the boss calls me into the meeting and they asked me this, I said hell no since I had no desire to try and get these two technologies to live together in a production environment, especially since migrating everything to mysql would allow us to do database replication to another server and I could do software raid over ethernet on yet another (this client is anal about backups and recovery.)
Luckily my boss is the type who listens to his sysadmins and the marketing division ended up buying a new 1U server for the sites and databases to live on.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I usually like to have evidence before I suspect the worst in someone.
How about putting money on ideas in brainstorm and bugs in launchpad? I got a scanner with _completely GPL drivers_ that doesn't Just Work with Ubuntu, so it's worthless to me. Paying $50 to have someone package the thing sanely sure beats buying a new scanner, why can't Canonical do that? Not being able to pay for Free Software angers me. I mean seriously, I have a job.
What makes one Linux better than another?
"Better" is not a concept you can apply to Linux distributions, anymore than you can apply it to (wait for it...) cars. Is a giant Ford truck better than a Prius? Well that really depends on how large the stuff you have to move in the near future is, doesn't it?
The better Linux distribution for you is the one that matches your business or personal priorities more closely. Since those are your priorities, no one else can answer that question for you.
Yeah strange you should mention pay since in my case it's not that good either. Great environment to work in though - one day the boss arrived with fifty of those huge balls chicks exercise with and plonked them down in the office.
We often sit on them for meetings or to work at our desks, or kick them around.
Great place to work, lower than average pay. I wonder if it is a trend in it?
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
If Canonical wants to make some desktop money, they should sell desktops with their software pre-installed and guaranteed to work, as in no hoop jumping for wifi support, whatever video is there, sound really works, etc.. They can still offer the freebie download version to all comers, but desktop purchasers get priority in the forums and support, etc. Just make it reasonably price competitive and it could work, no offering a $300 machine for $800 in other words just because it says official Ubuntu on it, because it won't sell then. Maybe $350 in that case would be reasonable (examples only), and stick the long term release candidates *only* on there, none of those six month beta quality things.
Ya, Dell and some others offer preinstalled..but that isn't Canonical offering it. It needs to be *their* machines with their software that they know will work. They target that hardware first with the developer action, all the time.
Sort of like the Apple idea, but using FOSS, sell the whole stack, and you know it will work with no hassles. Another aspect would be "legal in the USA" DVD and other media playback, if you buy the hardware, part of the money goes to pay the fees required for that. Purists have a thousand other options, so I wouldn't worry about that part if 1% or less on the machine is "non free". People mostly want their media to work, and that's it.
If local mom and pop whitebox shops can do business and make profits building systems from parts at low volume purchasing levels, one would think Ubuntu could get better deals from the Asian wholesalers buying thousands of untis at a time and just make sure what they get "just works". How about one netbook, one laptop, one desktop, one server? Four basic machines, that should cover a ton of normal usages. Ya, it might not fill every niche, but for a lot of people it might work and they could make some hard cash.
The music industry were complaining that "pirate" was too glamorous. Perhaps they adopted the term "rapist" then copyright infringement would have a bigger stigma.
I think the music industry already has the whole "raping music" thing covered.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
We're fine with moving priority to the new objective as soon as you've completed the former. ;-)
Ubuntu 10.04 presumably is not it just yet.
You do realize that bug has been fixed... and that it's not even released yet? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/565981 /. posting that story was really NOT news.... pre-release software has bugs, generally bugs get fixed, then software gets released.
FUD much?
I looked at Fedora a year or so ago. The package manager was ok. (I prefer apt-get + synaptic, but yum + synaptic + rpm wasn't bad.) OTOH, the package selection was poor. They had most of the more common packages, but finding anything what wasn't in the main repository meant trusting someone I'd never heard of. Not something I like to do regularly. And sometimes even finding the repository was sufficient work that it was easier to compile from source. And sometimes that didn't work. Debian was just more reliable and convenient. I'm thinking of switching to the new Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) fts, but that's largely because my wife is currently using Ubuntu, and it would be nice to be more familiar with the particular system she's using.
But for Fedora... well, a couple of years ago the basic system was quite solid. But they needed lots of work on application availability. (N.B.: They didn't have this problem back when it was the "Professional Version". And as I'm only considering FOSS software, price isn't likely to be the issue. It could be interest. I'm basically a programmer, not a systems admin, so I might have very different interests than the Fedora people, though I'd have expected that Debian would have the same bias, and it shows less of it than Ubuntu [which is biased towards simple].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
each commandline key-press counts as 10 mouseclicks
That's fair, considering commandlines like this
cat newuserslist.txt |while read X ; do useradd $X; done
save me 10 to 100 mouseclicks per keystroke
Sorry, for *his* complaint, that's why we have the AGPL. Unfortunately, it's not widely used. With cloud-style applications becoming more common, this will eventually be appreciated by some end users.
Web accessable applications are an area where the GPL places no restrictions on source code availability. In this area, it's in the same boat as the BSD. The AGPL addresses this weakness, and is compatible with GPL3. (I.e., GPL code can be moved to AGPL [though not, I believe, vice versa].)
CAUTION: IANAL. This is not a legal opinion. Etc. I've never had to deal with this interaction myself, this is based on on-line discussions between people I don't know.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's unfortunate that you had to go with the old "screw the techie" prediction, because the first part of your post was quite right and doesn't deserve to be grouped under the -1 Troll mod. Given Shuttleworth's own statements and actions, here's what I see the business plan being:
0) It's nearly impossible to compete with Microsoft on non-OS products, because of their monopoly status.
1) Take a product that has the potential to make an OS a commodity, nullifying Microsoft's major competitive advantage in ever other market.
2) Turn that product into an actual competitor by matching or exceeding Windows in quality and features
3) Get people using the product, and more importantly get vendors selling it
4) Produce products that compete in a different market, and take advantage of having a free, commodity OS
5) Profit on those other products now that MS can't use their Windows marketshare as the sole competitive advantage
http://www.mhall119.com
You co-worker is an idiot who neither understands the term OS, nor that Fedora is smaller than Ubuntu.
Wut? He created a whole community backlash by trying to market closed-source products using the Ubuntu name, which the open source community helped to build.
What makes one Linux better than another?
It always helps to try out different versions of linux. There are always little things that are different, or little things that work in one and not in another.
For example, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and normally run Kubuntu on my laptop. Since Ubuntu is more Gnome-centered the KDE version would have little bugs here and there (updating to 9.04 killed wireless networking - had to switch to WICD with a wired connection, I had a bunch of "available updates" appearing in the updater, only to tell me I can't actually update them when I tried, etc.)
I recently (this week) decided to try Fedora 12 and see if their KDE version is any better. The first thing I notice is that it uses nouveau by default for the graphics driver and they have decided to make it a pain in the ass to install the official nVidia driver. Also, dragging my finger along the right side of the touch pad to scroll doesn't work (it's a Thinkpad so that's the only thing I use the touch pad for. The eraser head is much better for moving the pointer.) I also noticed there is less stuff in the repository.
I'm still using Fedora on my laptop because I like to keep up on the different options (hence Gnome on the desktop even though I prefer KDE). Every OS has its quirks and the different versions of linux are no different.
For a server you have a whole different set of concerns and have to worry about reliability and how well the distro is tested for the types of applications you're using it for.
So "better" depends partly on application and partly on personal preference in most cases.
At work they run redhat, and it takes the sysadmins a lot of panicking to get packages installed I need to do my job (research programming). One line apt-get install for my Debian laptop or Ubuntu server (yes, I know I'm doing it wrong).
So I'm off programming instead of rolling rpms by hand.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I'd rather have a job like that than great pay and one I hate. I call it "pay per subjective hour." If every day feels like a week, how much money are you really making per subjective hour? As long as the pay is adequate, go with being happy.
Put identity in the browser.
Mike Cox? Is that you? Where have you been, buddy? You need to get back over to ZDNet, because they're dying without you. Loverock just can't fill your shoes!
Put identity in the browser.
I am well aware of Dell selling a few examples of Ubuntu based computers. And if you go to Dell's mainpage, not knowing they sold Ubuntu, you wouldn't know it, it is hidden. It's there on the site, but joe sixpack wouldn't see it. OK, so say I am joe sixpack, go to their main page, click over to desktops http://www.dell.com/home/desktops. On the side there they list "operating systems". I see windows, vista and 7. So this theoretical purchaser would have to know in advance they even sold Ubuntu to start searching around for it. That isn't support, it's a hidden in the back of the warehouse few examples of some old cruft they got kicking around, it isn't being pushed, not even close to equal billing. And that's the *best* they have in five years effort so far.
So, this is still *not the same* as a Canonical labeled and supported integrated hardware and software product, that's the point. With Dell labeling, they only have two of those things, and Dell obviously doesn't push it or you would see the choice/option right off the bat when you start shopping on their site. And the whole thread is about Ubuntu becoming something worth buying, for anyone, making them mo' money. They want to sell "the cloud", how about just selling a computer that works and is price competitive as well as "the cloud"? I bet if they tried, it just might work. Heck, start with the cheapest netbooks, maybe ARM based, work up from there. Dip a toe in that water.
Listen, it's not the most "hobby" OS: it's the OS used by people as a hobby (i.e. hobbyists).
Put identity in the browser.
They could do like RedHat and distribute a free version that's broken so users have to pay for support.
That's why I use the .NET framework. Oh--I also hate freedom and kick puppies.
... that's fine as long as you keep seeding the torrents.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Why the ODBC driver? MSSQL is sybase. Microsoft couldn't figure out how to build a proper database so they bought one. Try PHP's sybase interface if you must, but really, just use PostgreSQL, much better.
-1) Sue the U.S. government for allowing illegal monopolistic tactics by Microsoft to run rampant, and for those supposed to be keeping tabs on them for falling asleep at the wheel. Give citizens back their choice of software on the computers they purchase. If not Linux, at least allow a no-OS option.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
So you're saying RPM packages are more difficult to make than DEBs? I have an idea. Why not make the packages agnostic to the package managers, so you can choose the packaging format you like the best along with the manager you like the best? You know, freedom? All you have to do is load the package up with metadata to cover everyone's needs, and viola, a package that can be installed on any distro. That should help cut down on silly customized and tweaked builds of developer's software, and force the software to learn how to play nicer with other programs and come up with sane default configurations. Sure, come out with "distros" which come with certain packages pre-installed, or which slightly change this or that setting, but a lack of the freedom from a cross-distro Linux software ecosystem is going to continue to stifle Linux's progress. You'd think that kind of standardization would be at the forefront of a movement which is all about freedom and standards supposedly.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Depends what you want to do. The two approved distros for SAP, which I tinker with, are RedHat and SuSe enterprise server. I'm more familiar with the former (there are more books on it, at least in English) and the latter has no easy to use free version. For me, that leads to CentOS.
However CentOS totally sucks for multimedia - it doesn't even come with a working mp3 or mpeg player out of the box. I'm sure I could find something, but to me that's not a priority. If it's a priority to *you*, then maybe you'd want something else, maybe Fedora or Ubuntu.
In short: it's horses for courses.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Try PHP's sybase interface if you must
Does the Sybase protocol still work with newer versions of Microsoft SQL Server?
but really, just use PostgreSQL, much better.
One of the applications that we started to use before I came to the company is a commercial off-the-shelf set of VBA scripts that runs in Access, and it expects to talk to either Access's built-in database or Microsoft SQL Server. We've been trying to migrate some functions away from that to an in-house system running on Ubuntu and using a free SQL DBMS. But we aren't even close to replicating every feature that we use, and we still need to replicate changes in the M$SQL installation so that the old system can see it. The current workaround is a web-based SQL proxy written in Python and running on the Windows server; the Ubuntu box has no problem talking to that. Or do you have experience in migrating an installation of Stone Edge Order Manager Enterprise Edition to a free SQL DBMS?
Both Fedora and Ubuntu have convenient package managers and an active community. Other differences are mainly a matter of taste.
Has there been no talk of combining repositories, package formats or anything like that?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Not so much harder to make as fewer premade available. It is my opinion that deb is the superior format as it has a more transparent format and forces package designers to reduce reliance on custom scripts, thus simplifying removal, but in the end both formats do work.
Cross-distro packages are difficult because many distros are set up in incompatible ways with respect to locations, etc. Debian comes with alien which converts rpms to debs automatically, however the new packages don't always work quite right.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I run CentOS on my servers and Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora on workstations. I can get everything I need prepackaged on every system, it's just different defaults and themes as far as I can see.
If you want KDE, try OpenSUSE, their distribution is top notch on laptops. I use it on Dell and HP.
Cheap storage VM.