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Canonical Founder Says Recent Changes In Ubuntu Were Necessary To Prepare the Company For an IPO (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical was doing well with Ubuntu and cloud and container-related technologies, such as Juju, LXD, and Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS). In addition, its OpenStack and Kubernetes software stacks, according to Shuttleworth, are growing by leaps and bounds on both the public and private cloud. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said "in the last year, Ubuntu cloud growth had been 70 percent on the private cloud and 90 percent on the public cloud." In particular, "Ubuntu has been gaining more customers on the big five public clouds." What hadn't succeeded was Canonical's attempt to make Unity the universal interface for desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Shuttleworth was personally invested in this project, but at day's end, it wasn't getting enough adoption to make it profitable. So, Shuttleworth said with regret, Unity had to be dropped. This move also means Canonical will devote more of its time to "putting the company on the path to a IPO. We must figure out what steps we need to take moving forward." That means focusing on Canonical's most profitable lines. Specifically, "Ubuntu will never die. Ubuntu is the default platform on cloud computing. Juju, MaaS, and OpenStack are nearly unstoppable. We need to work out more of our IoT path. At the same time, we had to cut out those parts that couldn't meet an investors' needs. The immediate work is get all parts of the company profitable."
Was introduce me to Linux Mint. Thanks Mark!
Time to start looking for a replacement distro...
To do IPO they brought in analysts, who made recommendations.
I see a rough road for IPO at this phase. They've been a fixture for over 10 years and their repeated attempts to succeed as a business have been widely observed and have failed. While undoubtedly popular, it is painfully obvious because they are the most straightforward free option. They have not shown any hint of being able to parlay their status to significant revenue. Instead they have to keep hand waving less useful metrics about users of their software than any business relationships, and intentionally fuzzing things up by swapping the word 'customer' and 'user' as it makes sense ('user' to have big numbers and share, then pivot to referencing customers, to suggest the users==customers, rather than the reality that the vast majority of users of the platform will never become a revenue source).
If they had IPOed 10 years ago, things would have been new enough for the investors to be enamored with the visions of what *could* be, but the passage has time has dashed pretty much all of the hopes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Somebody needs to explain to me why a company always feels the need to be publicly traded. It is never good for the consumer. It shackles the company to be profitable regardless of quality.
I worked for a private company that did very, very well. Then the owners jumped ship and through a series of events finally went public. Everything went to shit after that.
The popularity of the IPA style in the last few years is a regrettable trend. It has to crowded out other, better, more balanced, more worthy craft beer styles on the pub's limited tap space. Dunkelweizen is particularly hard to find.
The business model being...?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Honestly, how? And why? Even on the server side, most of their stuff can be used for free. I know the trend is to sell "support contracts" and such, but I've never worked for a company that actually purchased one. I'm just curious. I really want them to succeed, as long as they do it with Free software. I'm just amazed that they make any money at all.
it was what people were used to
In that we got used to another distribution.
Unity is a great game engine.... oh wait...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
do you mean with a pint of IPA?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
thats why you drop all the expensive development efforts like unity and mir to use of the work of others for free. maybe with those out of work developers they can contribute to the common good and help move things like wayland along instead
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Our favorite local brewery was bought-out by Anheuser-Busch and they dropped the Kolsch. Dammit.
BTW, when did the ö character start working on Slashdot?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Having played just a bit lately with ChromeOS, I suspect that a true cloud platform would be better if stripped-down to essentials, especially if the point is to spin-up VMs at-will. An OS like ChromeOS, built on Linux Kernel and with only the daemons and permissions needed to do whatever cloud function is demanded, makes more sense than having a GUI-based, multipurpose server. ChromeOS obviously still has a GUI as it's tailored toward being an end-user frontend for web-delivered content, but it's been pared-back to the point that it only has on it what it needs and has permisisons that are intended to keep the user out of the system. If a cloud application is properly written then such permissions would probably work well to keep the system secure against both user and exterior threat so that it remains manageable through whatever management system is written for it.
Unity and Ubuntu are basically the opposite. Designed as both a full-service server and as a GUI, it hasn't been tailored for this. Using dpkg-based package management works great when setting up a static server but is not really suited to spontaneously spinning up additional instances, it would take too long to customize to the specific application.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So another computer company has repeated another error in logic - that 1 interface works on every platform:
Microsoft's massive phone market share and accolades for Win 8 for some reason are ignored.
Additionally, we see the path to the decline of Ubuntu - going public. Remove creativity and direction from users handing it to detached shareholders motivated only by EPS (earnings per share), dividends, and market cap will undoubtedly move Ubuntu in the "right" direction. ya.. that will happen.
I bailed on Ubuntu years ago and went to the source, Debian. Haven't looked back.
It's all built on the horrible Launchpad and Bazaar anyway.
Publicly owned businesses become focused on one thing and only one thing: profit. This is not good for Canonical or it's users because some very unpopular decisions will be made in the name of profit. Then again, perhaps it's time for Canonical to die because their past decisions haven't been much better.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
LOL and modded down to boot.
"-1 Uncomfortable Truth" much?
So it's bad Ubuntu used Unity by default and now it's bad that Ubuntu is not using Unity by default.
Typical Slashdot hate: damned if you do, damned if you don't
Ubuntu sold out to systemd because Debian sold out to systemd.
You missed the part in the middle where they attempted writing "upstart" as their own local "NIH daemon starting/hardware up-bringing" init replacement.
And kept trying even after the rest of the Linux world standardized on systemd instead.
(Just like they kept trying bazaar, even after everybody else moved to git)
(Just like they decided to not follow the common Wayland efforts, but write their own Mir)
etc.
Ubuntu tried, but it didn't work well for them.
Everybody else tried systemd and it turned okay for them.
Otherwise, they would have had to do all the work Devuan is doing now, to remove needless systemd dependencies.
If it's so much effort removing, maybe systemd wasn't that much needless.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Changing the UI suddenly presents new challenges for productive people who do not have the time, interest, or inclinati[o]n to focus on learning a new way of doing their daily tasks.
Yes, they should instead have followed the example of Microsoft.
no, wait...
(Ribbon interfaces are now suddenly all the rage ! Hey, now we need a tile-based interface !)
Compared to Microsoft interface delirium, Ubuntu's move Gnome2 -> Unity -> Gnome3 is much tame.
(Disclaimer: proud KDE user since the mid-late 90s. For obvious historical reasons)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
BTW, when did the ö character start working on Slashdot?
on the other hand I have spell ö as ö for years before ö started to get accepted.
(Or did Slashdot suddenly turn UTF-8 support on ? "éàöü" ? seems to work in preview already)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
(Or did Slashdot suddenly turn UTF-8 support on ? "éàöü" ?)
Øh ! göð !
That is the real top news of today !
UTF-8 finally working on /. (with the editor silently turning it into HTML numerical refs)
Soon we will be able to invoke Zalgo's name and spread the corruption.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Thanks to Canonical's efforts (and Red Hat's, to a somewhat lesser extent) Linux remains a nonentity in the desktop. Which is a good thing - I can still set up my Linux desktop without any of their bloatware, confident in the fact that the general public will not replace their Windows systems with Linux (what for? It is just a Windows wannabee) and therefore keeping the crooks mostly focused on Windows. Most Linux fans will not understand it that way, but the lack of a significant presence of Linux in the desktop is a blessing to many of us.
I just changed our password policy to require: A string at least 26 digits long A lower case letter An upper case letter A number Punctuation An Elvis song title The GPS coordinates of a national monument The binary representation of they day the password was created The octal birthdate of the password holder - mod 13 The weight of the password holder's last bowl movement in grams.
Upstart was available before systems was written.
(Yes, and even RedHat / CentOS used it at some point in time)
My point :
yet after nearly everybody dropped upstart in favor of systemd (or, in Gentoo's case, went a different path with SysVInit -> OpenRC transition),
Canonical persisted on using upstart instead.
They have a strong case of wanting to do things their own way differently from everybody else (cue in xkcd's "yet another standard" comic), despite not having the developers resources to do so. (Unlike, say, Gentoo. Apparently they can successfully maintain their OpenRC).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why even bother interviewing at a place if you already know that the hiring manager is consistently rejecting qualified candidates?