Staff and projects cut as Canonical tries to lure investors
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
Yes, there is already some support, but not at feature parity to bzr. https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git
I am impressed at how much of a community Launchpad has built, inspite of bazaar.
- Built-in translation support; there's a big community that can (and, in my experience, will!) help you translate your project's .pot files using Launchpad's interface. It also has auto-import and -export of files from the source repository.
- Build recipes; this allows you to build .deb packages for your project, and to put them in a PPA which makes them easily testable for Ubuntu users.
- Detailed progress tracking functionality; using releases, milestones, a nice bug tracker & blueprints.
While I've in the past used Bazaar in conjunction with Launchpad, I'm happy to see them make the switch to Git. With its larger development community and popularity, it's a natural choice. Just a shame it isn't as well integrated yet.
I really hope they drop bzr and move to git.
I understand that IoT and cloud deployments is the "next big thing" but the competition is incredibly fierce with players that have deep pockets.
For the record, Canonical was worth -£4.1 million in 2010 and it's now worth -£59.4 million. It has £22.2 million in cash and liabilities of -£326.6 million. [1] If it was a commercial operation rather than a millionaire's plaything, it would have closed a decade ago.
[1] https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-GROUP-...
Just like you would donate money to a charity you might decide to buy some stock in a company at IPO because you simply want to support their cause. It's also one of the reasons I bought an Ubuntu phone, I played around with it for a bit and ended up not using it because I'm too easily distracted.
If you're always looking for a return on every investment then you would have to decide against a lot of groups looking for money that need a shot in the arm in order to achieve their dreams, even if those dreams ultimately fail the road to that failed dream may yield useful spin-offs.
Investing is not all that black-and-white, and it is in general very hard to impossible to know which investments will yield a future return and which do not.
Investors that buy stock have fairly little say in the direction of the company until they achieve major interests, as such you're essentially along for the ride and if anything ever comes of it that is at the discretion of the majority interests in the company.
And once you have a majority interest you essentially own the company rather than that you are just an investor you are now at the helm.
Even VCs, who are arguably always looking for a profitable exit have no way to force such an exit other than to find a suitable partner and to activate what is known as a 'drag along' clause in the shareholder agreement (assuming that such an entry is present).
If they can't or that clause isn't there they are simply captive and will have to accept whatever dividend payments (or none) are issued by the company if the company ever turns a profit.
Canonical is a company that I think deserves a lot of praise and support for what they've done, even if it isn't the financial success that they might have hoped to achieve.
Obviously, given the fact that their product has been powering my desktop ever since I dropped 'Knoppix' makes me biased.
I would guess that Canonical's current strategy is doomed because the cost of providing support (which depends on human wage rates) is rising faster than charges. [1] I can't see that changing unless someone develops an AI that can support Linux.
[1] Be interested to hear contrary views from people who are actually involved in delivering software support, which I am not.
Another alternative is to dramatically restrict support for hardware configurations, like Apple does, and let the community deal with the rest. There would be some backlash but it probably wouldn't be lethal.
To be honest I don't think support is the problem anyway. The problem is that monetization channels are not materializing at the necessary volumes. RedHat "is" Linux in the enterprise datacentre, where the big money is. Ubuntu seems to rule the virtual-machine arena, which is a world of cheapskate corner-cutting startups; and personal desktops, which are fully commoditized. Their saas offerings have failed, and there are limits to what they can extract from iaas providers. Where can they find real money?
If I were Shuttleworth I'd try again with integrated services, but by acquisition and with better targeting. Ubuntu users are geeks, they won't pay you to save a few holiday pics. Buy and integrate dev-oriented services like spideroak and tarsnap; build some revenue-generating agreement with Jetbrains, Microsoft, Oracle etc to integrate their tools on Ubuntu; build a real appstore (i think they are working on something like that). This stuff won't generate bazillion dollars, but could create the space to find that one or two killer features that people will pay good money for.
I as assuming that Canonical support would mainly have to tackle pretty tough problems, because users will solve the simpler ones themselves. That's very unlike Windows support, where quite a lot of people get stumped by trivia.
I have met various Canonical staff in the past and they seem like nice guys, but I've never understood how they thought they could make enough money to support 600 to 700 staff. I don't see that there's much they can do that Red Hat can't do, and Red Hat had a 10-year head start....
I wish Canonical and the Ubuntu team the best of luck, though I worry that that might not be enough.
If Ubuntu itself becomes a sacrificial cow, I wonder what happens to its downstreams like LinuxMint.