Does not make a sense to sell yet. It is now the biggest independent distribution in all categories. The more mature the market becomes, the biggest the value for Canonical.
For servers, I believe Ubuntu surpassed Debian in popularity recently and is now the most popular distro for both desktop and servers. It's certainly the default option for many cloud hosting companies.
So, 125 Million US$ revenue / 566 employees = $221000 revenue / employee. Not bad for a software company.
According to my own personal regression analysis I did many years ago, a company is sustainable with at least $50000 revenue per employee. That's my personal ballpark number.
Canonical very definitely gets paid every time someone spins up an Ubuntu VM on AWS or any other cloud provider. Not much, perhaps, but there are a lot of Ubuntu VM's spun up.
AWS doesn't necessarily have to pay Canonical for Ubuntu VM's, but if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to use the trademark "Ubuntu".
OVH wasn't paying Canonical, got sued because of it, and had to settle.
In the OVH case, a modified kernel was being shipped without (apparently) following the guidelines. I've seen an AWS suffix on kernel upgrades and they may or may not have an agreement to pay, but I'm thinking _very definitely_ is stated too strongly.
> For servers, I believe Ubuntu surpassed Debian in popularity recently
You're probably correct, but man is that a sign of our industry's immaturity. Debian is a stable and free platform on which to build a product. Ubuntu is a fine end-user distro, but it is neither as stable nor as free as Debian.
I am truly sad when OpenSUSE and SUSE isn't in the conversation about stability and popularity for servers. They have been rock solid give you the option of a rolling release and paid support if you want it.
Ubuntu is not default at any of the top three providers.
I don't think Amazon EC2 and Azure Compute have a default per se, though Amazon does support and maintain Amazon Linux (in the RHEL/CentOS family) in a way it doesn't do with any other distribution.
Google Compute Engine defaults to Debian.
Of course, all three make it easy to use most of the major distros including Ubuntu (and Debian). Google's GCP support contracts will even support the images for all distros which they publish directly as well as certain partner-published images.
(Disclosure: I previously worked at Google on the GCE team, including much of the work to launch Google's Debian images and collaborating with Canonical to validate and help launch their GCE Ubuntu images. I have not worked for Google since 2015 but am still involved in Debian's public cloud efforts in other capacities.)
Sure, I'd believe that. Neither Ubuntu not RHEL is the default on AWS, but it's clear Ubuntu is popular in that environment. (Most of RHEL's paid subscription base is still on-premises, I suspect.)
Google has switched the basis of their corporate workstation Linux distro from Ubuntu to be Debian testing directly, and renamed it from Goobuntu to gLinux.
This was publicly disclosed by one of the involved Googlers (she is also a Debian developer) at Debian's annual developer conference last year in Montreal, DebConf17.
It was just a 5-minute lightning talk in a segment with many lightning talks, but video should be online if you're curious, and some online news articles exist too.
The fact that x-distro might be bought, is part of the reason Linux has little traction in enterprise.
Look at redhat, we have a terrible relationship with IBM in the European public sector, and now that they’ve bought Redhat, we’re already planning for exits on our JBOSS portfolios in preparation for the inevitable fuck up.
That’s easy to do. It’s like changing the plumbing while the homeowners are at work. If you do it right, no users will notice.
Imagine doing that with the main OS your employees are using.
Maybe you could do it in the tech sector with little effort, but in a sector like mine it would pull the floor out from under thousands of workers who aren’t computer savvy.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but when windows or office breaks I have a phone line directly to Seattle and their incident management will stay with me on priority issues until they are fixed and it’s been like that for the past 25 years.
Stability is everything in enterprise, and everything organisational about Linux is chaos.
That’s kind of my point though, if Amazon took over Ubuntu, then I wouldn’t mind using it for production.
IBM is literally the only major software with services company we have reservations about, and it’s only because they’ve been consistently terrible, unresponsive and completely inagile for two decades.
No doubt it's worth a few billion already. Thing is companies run by developers tend to have a lot more integrity than the markets of silicon valley. If everyone folds there won't be open software.
I actually wouldn't mind being able to run things like Office and the Adobe suite in a reliable and officially-supported way under Ubuntu. Although proper native packages would be preferable, of course.
Could they do something like what Aardman Studios did? The company saves up money to buy out the owner at fair value then puts the shares in a trust and effectively makes the employees the owners
>Actually, the question most of us wanted him to answer is: "After IBM paid a cool $43-billion would he consider selling Canonical?" ... Shuttleworth said, "No, I value my independence."
Seems pretty cut and dry to me. The rest of the article was just speculation probably just to get more clicks.
I love Ubuntu, I have it on dual boot on a old computer and it works but Mark look like a hobbo with that beard, (no offense buddy, I know you went to the moon)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadFull accounts at https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05055134/filing-h...
If they'll make an IPO next year they'll have to tell us how they are making money. Just wait and see.
According to my own personal regression analysis I did many years ago, a company is sustainable with at least $50000 revenue per employee. That's my personal ballpark number.
AWS doesn't necessarily have to pay Canonical for Ubuntu VM's, but if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to use the trademark "Ubuntu".
OVH wasn't paying Canonical, got sued because of it, and had to settle.
You're probably correct, but man is that a sign of our industry's immaturity. Debian is a stable and free platform on which to build a product. Ubuntu is a fine end-user distro, but it is neither as stable nor as free as Debian.
I don't think Amazon EC2 and Azure Compute have a default per se, though Amazon does support and maintain Amazon Linux (in the RHEL/CentOS family) in a way it doesn't do with any other distribution.
Google Compute Engine defaults to Debian.
Of course, all three make it easy to use most of the major distros including Ubuntu (and Debian). Google's GCP support contracts will even support the images for all distros which they publish directly as well as certain partner-published images.
(Disclosure: I previously worked at Google on the GCE team, including much of the work to launch Google's Debian images and collaborating with Canonical to validate and help launch their GCE Ubuntu images. I have not worked for Google since 2015 but am still involved in Debian's public cloud efforts in other capacities.)
This was publicly disclosed by one of the involved Googlers (she is also a Debian developer) at Debian's annual developer conference last year in Montreal, DebConf17.
It was just a 5-minute lightning talk in a segment with many lightning talks, but video should be online if you're curious, and some online news articles exist too.
Very few are general purpose desktops.
About 250, so 15%, are specialist single-purpose desktops. Rest are servers (i.e. they lack x11-xserver)
Look at redhat, we have a terrible relationship with IBM in the European public sector, and now that they’ve bought Redhat, we’re already planning for exits on our JBOSS portfolios in preparation for the inevitable fuck up.
That’s easy to do. It’s like changing the plumbing while the homeowners are at work. If you do it right, no users will notice.
Imagine doing that with the main OS your employees are using.
Maybe you could do it in the tech sector with little effort, but in a sector like mine it would pull the floor out from under thousands of workers who aren’t computer savvy.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but when windows or office breaks I have a phone line directly to Seattle and their incident management will stay with me on priority issues until they are fixed and it’s been like that for the past 25 years.
Stability is everything in enterprise, and everything organisational about Linux is chaos.
So I don't blame any FOSS project to eventually sell out when its users aren't willing to support them accordingly.
IBM is literally the only major software with services company we have reservations about, and it’s only because they’ve been consistently terrible, unresponsive and completely inagile for two decades.
Seems pretty cut and dry to me. The rest of the article was just speculation probably just to get more clicks.