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Comment by clock_tower | Hacker News Reader

8-10 years from now, I expect we'll see:

"Shuttleworth made it clear that the cloud isn't the financial future of the company. He wrote: 'The <latest-big-idea> story for Ubuntu is excellent and continues to improve.'"

I don't have anything against Ubuntu, but I do have something against chasing the latest fad. I know, the cloud isn't a fad, but mobile wasn't a fad either.

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Cloud may be a fad, but Ubuntu is making a lot of money on it. Mobile may not have been a fad, but Ubuntu was losing a lot of money on it.

Android is killing it and there is no viable open alternative.

> Android is killing it and there is no viable open alternative.

Because of all the services Google provide on top of it. That's where the real value is, just like iOS, CyanogenMOD and co don't seem that popular. If Microsoft wants to make a come-back in the mobile space, that's where it needs to focus.

That's good to hear! They need to stick around; we need an ecology of power-user desktops that's bigger than Microsoft, Microsoft, and Google.

I never liked Unity and I'm comfortable with Gnome, so I think this change is good.

But, fer cryin out loud, Ubuntu, how many goddamn times do you need to change things around? UI? init system? Firewall management? It goes on and on.

This is the stuff of nightmares if you manage more than one distro version, and I feel I'm starting to slowly hate this distribution, even though I use it a lot and it works great (provided you remember which version does what all the time).

Their leadership projects a weak, hesitant image. There's no one at the rudder and the ship is being blown by the winds every which way.

I just want graphics stack that doesn't lag, supports window manager with tiling features.

Init system? are you brain washed by propaganda dude? Red HAt used and stil uses upstart in older versions, how can you blame Canonical creating it instead of using systemd that was not yet created???

The difference is that Ubuntu is already the de-facto dominant player here. As far as AWS goes, the Canonical Ubuntu AMI is the most popular one, except maybe the default Amazon one.

but dominant != revenue generating. Sure they make decent money with juju if you're needing help setting up openstack. Juju is actually underrated for what it does, and the engineers have done impressive work. But of "90%" of the startups using the Ubuntu AMIs on AWS, how many of them are actively paying Canonical anything at all?

Meanwhile, old boring Redhat just made 2 billion dollars in revenue and is still just slowly improving.

I might be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure I read that AWS pays Canonical for a support contract on the official Ubuntu AMIs, to make sure they stay stable and up-to-date with the new Xen versions AWS uses, etc.

Anyway, even if they aren't making (significant) money on it now, having market dominance certainly puts them in a better position to profit eventually, than in mobile where they first have to unseat the three largest software companies in the world, on those companies' most lucrative markets.

Canonical has a commercial relationship with dozens of public clouds, ensuring that the Ubuntu in each of those clouds is securely produced, actively maintained, and at the standards and quality Ubuntu users expect. See the list of excellent commercial cloud partners at:

https://partners.ubuntu.com/programmes/public-cloud

Thanks Dustin. I know you're a canonical employee so this is about as official of an answer as I'll get. Much appreciated.

"How many of them are actively paying Canonical anything at all?"

All of them. Ubuntu gets a cut for every instance of Ubuntu on AWS. The Ubuntu AMI's are not stock Ubuntu, they've been modified. So Amazon has to pay Canonical to use the Ubuntu name or it has to call them something else. That's why Canonical is suing OVH; OVH is using a heavily (and poorly) modified Ubuntu without renaming or paying.

Oh interesting, that was news to me most certainly. Do you have a source?

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/744609239075799044

For Amazon, not for OVH. For Amazon they could ask them not to pay due to the name. OVH doesn't have the brand that Amazon does.

Ubuntu is NOT suing OVH.

Quite the opposite, in fact: https://www.ovh.com/us/news/cp2445.ovh_joins_ubuntu_certifie...

Oh, that's awesome. I wasn't precise, they were just threatening to sue, glad to see it got resolved.

Does that mean that if I choose an Ubuntu image when installing an OVH server I won't get the OVH crap any more?

Hi Dustin, sorry for offtopic but why not use MATE, you have some MATE developers working for Canonical and I think Ubuntu MATE is more popular then the Gnome version.

I don't really think this can be chalked up to chasing fads. Any sane business owner is going to want to spend time and resources going where the money is. He makes it pretty clear in the blog post that cloud and iot is where the money is, and since Canonical is a for-profit entity that's where they've gotta focus their time and effort on.

That's fine; but the silliness is the "convergence" mantra. Different devices have different requirements, one size does not fit all; if you don't have the will to spend on multiple teams to build different gui shells, don't get in the game.

Microsoft learnt this the hard way, almost losing its desktop dominance to the chimera of converged UI; and it looks like all desktop vendors are slowly reaching similar conclusions.

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