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by Alupis 4148 days ago
That's not quite how it gets expensed (nor how it works).

Canonical's cloud business might be profitable (even though Canonical as a whole is very-mush-so-not), however their cloud business is not coupled to Ubuntu, ie. they could use any Linux Distro, or any OS for the matter.

Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical. It's surprising to a lot of people given it's popularity... but popularity doesn't equal profitability... especially when most users don't pay anything for the software (not even support fees).
1 comments
raverbashing 4147 days ago
"Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical"

Typical beancounter mentality.

Probably comes with a suggestion of closing this division and going with something else

OF COURSE this department loses money. But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist.

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Alupis 4147 days ago
> OF COURSE this department loses money.

Not sure what "of course" means here... it's very possible to be profitable off your OS Development division... look at Red Hat, SUSE, etc. They pay for the development from support payments... they collect support payments because enterprise wants their OS... it's a positive feedback loop. The better the OS, the more enterprise pays, the more funding RH can put into the OS dev team, the better the OS gets, the more support fees they collect, etc etc etc...

Canonical has not been able to successfully charge for support like RH and SUSE have figured out.

> But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist.

It's not a net gain unless the company can be profitable as a whole and subsidize (and justify the enormous expense) off-put by tertiary services, etc.

... right now Ubuntu project is responsible for Canonical being perpetually in the red... every quarter, since their foundation. Canonical could very well just run enterprise support contracts, or push their cloud services. They don't have to use Ubuntu... any OS would suffice. They aren't somehow coupled to Ubuntu to the point if Ubuntu didn't exist, Canonical wouldn't either.

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