Mark Shuttleworth is not selling Canonical or Ubuntu – yet
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Seems pretty cut and dry to me. The rest of the article was just speculation probably just to get more clicks.
Full 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.