Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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