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Which then raises the question, how does - if at all - Ubuntu make money for Canonical?

llarsson 7y ago
Business support and private cloud offerings (as in: pay Canonical to come set up a private cloud for you on machines you own). Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses.
- freeone3000 7y ago
  Right, just like HP would be the default choice for desktops, Lenovo the default choice for laptops, and Cisco the default choice for networking hardware.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses. I mean, with regards to Linux Enterprise stuff... it is. SuSE is the boss when it comes to SAP, but otherwise everything lives on some flavor of Red Hat or derivative; CentOS is everywhere. In the Enterprise we only roll with stuff that is officially supported. Hiring freezes, layoffs, and general work ebb-and-flow means we will need to rope in help at some point, and while I may be a wiz at some CLI functions I'm not up on what each patch is doing to the environment. Having a support contract to lean on is a huge advantage. Canonical was (is?) effectively trying to do this on the .deb side of the house (as opposed to the .rpm side), though I don't know how successful they were/are. I looked at interviewing w/ Canonical, but the Glassdoor reviews painted a picture of an org that was having deep growing pains and internal struggles.
bregma 7y ago
It doesn't. The Ubuntu desktop was a hobby project for a tech-oriented individual with deep pockets. In 2017 the Ubuntu desktop project was virtually eliminated as a loss-maker in the run up to going public. Now, Ubuntu is just enabling technology for (profitable) cloud services and (hopefully in the future profitable) IoT and ships with a slightly customized version Red Hat's Gnome Shell desktop.

Business support and private cloud offerings (as in: pay Canonical to come set up a private cloud for you on machines you own). Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses.

freeone3000 7y ago
Right, just like HP would be the default choice for desktops, Lenovo the default choice for laptops, and Cisco the default choice for networking hardware.
blaser-waffle 7y ago
> Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses. I mean, with regards to Linux Enterprise stuff... it is. SuSE is the boss when it comes to SAP, but otherwise everything lives on some flavor of Red Hat or derivative; CentOS is everywhere. In the Enterprise we only roll with stuff that is officially supported. Hiring freezes, layoffs, and general work ebb-and-flow means we will need to rope in help at some point, and while I may be a wiz at some CLI functions I'm not up on what each patch is doing to the environment. Having a support contract to lean on is a huge advantage. Canonical was (is?) effectively trying to do this on the .deb side of the house (as opposed to the .rpm side), though I don't know how successful they were/are. I looked at interviewing w/ Canonical, but the Glassdoor reviews painted a picture of an org that was having deep growing pains and internal struggles.

bregma 7y ago

It doesn't. The Ubuntu desktop was a hobby project for a tech-oriented individual with deep pockets. In 2017 the Ubuntu desktop project was virtually eliminated as a loss-maker in the run up to going public. Now, Ubuntu is just enabling technology for (profitable) cloud services and (hopefully in the future profitable) IoT and ships with a slightly customized version Red Hat's Gnome Shell desktop.