[kwlug-disc] How Canonical makes money ...

[Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)]

On Friday, May 14, 2010 10:50:26 pm Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 8:12 PM, William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > This begs the question... how does Ubuntu make money (eventually)?
> They are a private company, so numbers are not readily available, but ...

> They have several initiatives for making money.
> - "Cloud" offering where people can store their stuff and pay for it.
> - Enterprise Cloud offering.
> - Support for enterprise clients (both desktop and servers)
> - Partnerships (e.g. inclusion of proprietary packages in special
> repositories)
> - Certification for hardware
> - Training.

> Now, how successful is any of the above? One can only guess.

Well, I haven't really heard or seen ANY of these services or anyone touting 
these services in the wild... that to me is a pretty big indication of how 
successful these things are.

I love what Canonical has done for Linux, don't get me wrong. I'm even running 
Kubuntu on all of my systems and recommend either Ubuntu or Kubuntu to 
everyone who wants to "check out this Linux thing" because it's so pervasive.  
Right now, though, I feel that all of Canoncial's wealth is in street cred and 
far, far less in actual revenue.

-A.