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machinecoffee | 6 years ago

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

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bregma|6 years 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.

llarsson|6 years 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.

blaser-waffle|6 years 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.

freeone3000|6 years 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.