A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.
It isn’t to me. People keep using what they are familiar with on their servers. Plus it’s one of the default option at most hosting provider.
Ubuntu is wildly popular on desktops and in the cloud (and largely for good reasons, all the phone-home and marketing etc. aside, it's a solid and polished distro), but I expect a vanishingly small fraction of Ubuntu users actually pay a dime to Canonical. Now Canonical has been trying to monetize Ubuntu in various ways over the years, some better and some worse, but I do hope they succeed so that Ubuntu is long term sustainable.
There is no AIX or HP-UX in the wild anymore, at least not outside of niche or legacy deployments, because RHEL ate it up.
Every enterprise I've ever been at required official licenses and official escalation and support SLAs. By offering enterprise support and reasonable response times they became the de facto winner of the Unix enterprise world.
Ubuntu still reigns supreme for individual users, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to F500 companies.
Nobody learning Linux for the first time today is excited about Ubuntu.
I wonder if this will seriously erode Canonical's position in the Enterprise market, or if they're sufficiently entrenched to just coast for another generation.