According to Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu, is ready to start planning for its initial public offering, an event that can be expected to happen sometime next year.
[...] In addition to an IPO that might be in the works, it appears that the company is at least approaching profitability. According to Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, Shuttleworth said on Thursday during a press briefing focused on last week's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, that Canonical's revenues last year were $175 million, and that the biggest issue the company is facing is that it can't meet customer demand, mainly due to a shortage of tech talent.
[...] According to Lardinois, Shuttleworth also made it clear that any IPO would not be driven by any need to raise funds to meet obligations.
It's been obvious to folks watching Canonical that for some time the company's focus hasn't been on Ubuntu's desktop operating system but on its server OS. This shift began in earnest in 2017, which is when it decided that Ubuntu Touch, the mobile OS it'd been developing, was a no starter and announced its demise as a Canonical project, along with Unity, its homegrown desktop environment which was replaced with Gnome.
By that time, Ubuntu Server was becoming popular and had already become the most used Linux distribution on Amazon Web Services. Since then, not only has the company found success monetizing its server business through security subscriptions and such, but has become a major player in the Kubernetes- and container-focused cloud native arena.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @10:51PM (4 children)
Bookmark this post.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Give it time, but eventually Microsoft will buy out Canonical.
Just like the poisoned outstretched hand to Novell when they had SUSE Linux, and where is Novell now? Dead.
Microsoft, or One Microsoft Way as I like to call it, is a mafia.
While Ubuntu may eventually fall or be crippled by Microsoft, Debian must be protected at all costs. Sadly it's being undermined by, how to politely say this.... "strange creatures."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @11:04PM
It's an interesting, and scary, idea. So you think Microsoft is trying to buy up/out all the commercial Linux-clones to kill them? Or whenever they get enough momentum going.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:32AM (1 child)
Or a proxy "front" corporation will buy it out, loosely connected to M$, of course.
Ubuntu's first mistakes were Unity, along with sending search queries to what was it, Amazon?
Now we have "snaps" which remind me of Lindows' (Linspire) "Click N Run" (aka CNR) venture which I refuse to use.
And yes, Debian should be defended from all attacks and should refuse to include M$ (and/or former M$) "volunteers." (which is difficult since they're everywhere)
I'll end it with a conspiracy theory. I believe Ian Murdock was murdered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:34AM
Or forced into suicide by harassment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2022, @04:01AM
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=54644 [soylentnews.org] submit queue is always full of "upstart", this one was pruned earlier than others. Too snarky? Edit and leave the core part: "voting process is changing, discuss if for better/worse".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @11:44PM (2 children)
Who actually pays for Ubuntu?
Red Hat catered to the corporate, especially server market with support contracts, but ubuntu is marketed to desktop market where there are plenty of options, many/most free (as in beer).
Mark Shuttleworth is a liar. IPO is to raise fund in the public capital market, and those that fund it do so to make money, not for charity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:11AM
This is to raise funds for Shuttle worth, not Ubuntu.
He is probably ready to let go snd retire, or start something new.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:48PM
Canonical/Ubuntu has their secondary focus on the desktop market as a gateway drug to their server products, but their revenue is in cloud services, just like Red Hat. But yeah, despite Ubuntu Server's dominance on the cloud, Canonical has few paying customers.
I have mixed feelings about Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical. Ubuntu (and the Ubuntu derivatives) are the most popular Linux desktop distribution for some good reasons. There are also lots of screwups on the way: Unity, the Amazon integration, Mir, Ubuntu Touch, Snaps. If all of those resources had been poured into Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server, maybe Ubuntu would be considerably more successful than it already is. But if Canonical has an IPO and some other investors take over, will some other person or group's focus on Return-on-Investment be better or worse for Canonical than Shuttleworth's uneven leadership?
Separately, for a brief time Ubuntu had "Ubuntu One", their own cloud service for backing up user data and music streaming. Ubuntu One still exists as a sign on option, but they killed the cloud features in 2014. I wish they had kept investing in it, I think it had potential.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @12:02AM
... but a surplus of blue-hairs ready to use IPO dollars to enforce the CoC.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:05AM (2 children)
So, it is approaching profitability, but Mark is planning IPO, because… what? If it's not driven by the need of funds, than there is simply no reason to do it. It only sums up if Mark needs a golden parachute, and is planning to use IPO for that. Which means that "profitability" is BS, and it is nowhere near to be seen.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:52PM
While the basic thesis is probably correct, the assessment of honesty is dubious. It *may* be correct, but he's getting up there, and may just want to get what he can and retire. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether or not the company is profitable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday April 28 2022, @03:15PM
I know the reason: Mark Shuttleworth has seen what Elon has been up to, and Shuttleworth wants to get back into the "super rich South African" mantra. I guess one spaceflight per lifetime isn't enough!
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @06:12AM
Soylent Admin! There is an illegal and illicit wrongful spam mod at https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=48726&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&threshold=0&highlightthresh=-1&page=1&cid=1236687#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] Please rectify at your earliest convenience.
Thank you,
AC