5 ms·

Staff and projects cut as Canonical tries to lure investors

50 points by jwildeboer 10y ago

tmsldd 10y ago
That makes sense...
dingdingdang 10y ago
Goodbye to Unity then.
- mverwijs 10y ago
  As announced by Mark Shuttleworth this week, Gnome will be back as default in Ubuntu 18.04.
keithpeter 10y ago
So potentially between 240 and 420 people going and a good proportion of those will be developers or at least technically skilled. I recollect that Canonical had a remote workforce so locations of the people being made redundant will be distributed in various job markets. Good luck to them!
- jononor 10y ago
  Yes, lots of skilled people now need to find something new. Hope we see some new projects/companies come out also!
jwildeboer 10y ago
FTR Mods changed the headline. Don't blame me as OP for that :-)
- jacquesm 10y ago
  What was your title?
sandGorgon 10y ago
I hope they get rid of the bzr versioning tool for their project management and adopt git. It's far more compatible with upstream - there's a significant effort to just syncing between git and bzr. Yes, there is already some support, but not at feature parity to bzr. https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git I am impressed at how much of a community Launchpad has built, inspite of bazaar.
- marten-de-vries 10y ago
  Launchpad still has a couple of very nice features you do not see at e.g. Github, in particular for desktop-oriented software: - Built-in translation support; there's a big community that can (and, in my experience, will!) help you translate your project's .pot files using Launchpad's interface. It also has auto-import and -export of files from the source repository. - Build recipes; this allows you to build .deb packages for your project, and to put them in a PPA which makes them easily testable for Ubuntu users. - Detailed progress tracking functionality; using releases, milestones, a nice bug tracker & blueprints. While I've in the past used Bazaar in conjunction with Launchpad, I'm happy to see them make the switch to Git. With its larger development community and popularity, it's a natural choice. Just a shame it isn't as well integrated yet.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    Launchpad is definitely nice. Bzr is the problem. I would go as far as saying that a lot of the ui flows from how bzr (and the lp tool behaves). I really hope they drop bzr and move to git.
scorpioxy 10y ago
I wonder why would they need investors? Investors would be looking for some form of exit. What would Canonical, a primarily services company offer in terms of an exit for any investor? I understand that IoT and cloud deployments is the "next big thing" but the competition is incredibly fierce with players that have deep pockets.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Not every class of investor is looking for an exit.
  - scholia 10y ago
    Nonetheless, I would assume investors are looking to make a profit at some point. And as far as I know, Canonical has never made a profit, nor come anywhere near it. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any circumstances where it would make a profit from desktop Linux. For the record, Canonical was worth -£4.1 million in 2010 and it's now worth -£59.4 million. It has £22.2 million in cash and liabilities of -£326.6 million. [1] If it was a commercial operation rather than a millionaire's plaything, it would have closed a decade ago. [1] https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-GROUP-LIMITED/financials https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-GROUP-...
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      I'd be happy to invest without expecting any return on my investment. I've done so a couple of times with other companies in the past and for the most part I'm perfectly ok with the outcome. Just like you would donate money to a charity you might decide to buy some stock in a company at IPO because you simply want to support their cause. It's also one of the reasons I bought an Ubuntu phone, I played around with it for a bit and ended up not using it because I'm too easily distracted. If you're always looking for a return on every investment then you would have to decide against a lot of groups looking for money that need a shot in the arm in order to achieve their dreams, even if those dreams ultimately fail the road to that failed dream may yield useful spin-offs. Investing is not all that black-and-white, and it is in general very hard to impossible to know which investments will yield a future return and which do not. Investors that buy stock have fairly little say in the direction of the company until they achieve major interests, as such you're essentially along for the ride and if anything ever comes of it that is at the discretion of the majority interests in the company. And once you have a majority interest you essentially own the company rather than that you are just an investor you are now at the helm. Even VCs, who are arguably always looking for a profitable exit have no way to force such an exit other than to find a suitable partner and to activate what is known as a 'drag along' clause in the shareholder agreement (assuming that such an entry is present). If they can't or that clause isn't there they are simply captive and will have to accept whatever dividend payments (or none) are issued by the company if the company ever turns a profit. Canonical is a company that I think deserves a lot of praise and support for what they've done, even if it isn't the financial success that they might have hoped to achieve. Obviously, given the fact that their product has been powering my desktop ever since I dropped 'Knoppix' makes me biased.
dorfsmay 10y ago
Investors will want to see more revenues. I always wondered why Canonical doesn't offer a small subscription fee for slow-email-only tech support. Make it a reasonable price and I suspect a lot of people would be willing to pay.
tombert 10y ago
While I do not fault Canonical at all for these decisions, I find it a little disappointing whenever I am reminded that a Free Software project is under the same constraints as any other company, and as a result needs money. I wish Canonical and the Ubuntu team the best of luck, though I worry that that might not be enough.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
a3n 10y ago
> "No part of the business had sacred cows," he told El Reg. If Ubuntu itself becomes a sacrificial cow, I wonder what happens to its downstreams like LinuxMint.

50 points by jwildeboer 10y ago

tmsldd 10y ago

That makes sense...

dingdingdang 10y ago

Goodbye to Unity then.

mverwijs 10y ago
As announced by Mark Shuttleworth this week, Gnome will be back as default in Ubuntu 18.04.

keithpeter 10y ago

So potentially between 240 and 420 people going and a good proportion of those will be developers or at least technically skilled. I recollect that Canonical had a remote workforce so locations of the people being made redundant will be distributed in various job markets. Good luck to them!

jononor 10y ago
Yes, lots of skilled people now need to find something new. Hope we see some new projects/companies come out also!

jwildeboer 10y ago

FTR Mods changed the headline. Don't blame me as OP for that :-)

jacquesm 10y ago
What was your title?

sandGorgon 10y ago

I hope they get rid of the bzr versioning tool for their project management and adopt git. It's far more compatible with upstream - there's a significant effort to just syncing between git and bzr. Yes, there is already some support, but not at feature parity to bzr. https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git I am impressed at how much of a community Launchpad has built, inspite of bazaar.

marten-de-vries 10y ago
Launchpad still has a couple of very nice features you do not see at e.g. Github, in particular for desktop-oriented software: - Built-in translation support; there's a big community that can (and, in my experience, will!) help you translate your project's .pot files using Launchpad's interface. It also has auto-import and -export of files from the source repository. - Build recipes; this allows you to build .deb packages for your project, and to put them in a PPA which makes them easily testable for Ubuntu users. - Detailed progress tracking functionality; using releases, milestones, a nice bug tracker & blueprints. While I've in the past used Bazaar in conjunction with Launchpad, I'm happy to see them make the switch to Git. With its larger development community and popularity, it's a natural choice. Just a shame it isn't as well integrated yet.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  Launchpad is definitely nice. Bzr is the problem. I would go as far as saying that a lot of the ui flows from how bzr (and the lp tool behaves). I really hope they drop bzr and move to git.

scorpioxy 10y ago

I wonder why would they need investors? Investors would be looking for some form of exit. What would Canonical, a primarily services company offer in terms of an exit for any investor? I understand that IoT and cloud deployments is the "next big thing" but the competition is incredibly fierce with players that have deep pockets.

jacquesm 10y ago
Not every class of investor is looking for an exit.
- scholia 10y ago
  Nonetheless, I would assume investors are looking to make a profit at some point. And as far as I know, Canonical has never made a profit, nor come anywhere near it. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any circumstances where it would make a profit from desktop Linux. For the record, Canonical was worth -£4.1 million in 2010 and it's now worth -£59.4 million. It has £22.2 million in cash and liabilities of -£326.6 million. [1] If it was a commercial operation rather than a millionaire's plaything, it would have closed a decade ago. [1] https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-GROUP-LIMITED/financials https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-GROUP-...
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    I'd be happy to invest without expecting any return on my investment. I've done so a couple of times with other companies in the past and for the most part I'm perfectly ok with the outcome. Just like you would donate money to a charity you might decide to buy some stock in a company at IPO because you simply want to support their cause. It's also one of the reasons I bought an Ubuntu phone, I played around with it for a bit and ended up not using it because I'm too easily distracted. If you're always looking for a return on every investment then you would have to decide against a lot of groups looking for money that need a shot in the arm in order to achieve their dreams, even if those dreams ultimately fail the road to that failed dream may yield useful spin-offs. Investing is not all that black-and-white, and it is in general very hard to impossible to know which investments will yield a future return and which do not. Investors that buy stock have fairly little say in the direction of the company until they achieve major interests, as such you're essentially along for the ride and if anything ever comes of it that is at the discretion of the majority interests in the company. And once you have a majority interest you essentially own the company rather than that you are just an investor you are now at the helm. Even VCs, who are arguably always looking for a profitable exit have no way to force such an exit other than to find a suitable partner and to activate what is known as a 'drag along' clause in the shareholder agreement (assuming that such an entry is present). If they can't or that clause isn't there they are simply captive and will have to accept whatever dividend payments (or none) are issued by the company if the company ever turns a profit. Canonical is a company that I think deserves a lot of praise and support for what they've done, even if it isn't the financial success that they might have hoped to achieve. Obviously, given the fact that their product has been powering my desktop ever since I dropped 'Knoppix' makes me biased.

dorfsmay 10y ago

Investors will want to see more revenues. I always wondered why Canonical doesn't offer a small subscription fee for slow-email-only tech support. Make it a reasonable price and I suspect a lot of people would be willing to pay.

tombert 10y ago

While I do not fault Canonical at all for these decisions, I find it a little disappointing whenever I am reminded that a Free Software project is under the same constraints as any other company, and as a result needs money. I wish Canonical and the Ubuntu team the best of luck, though I worry that that might not be enough.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

a3n 10y ago

> "No part of the business had sacred cows," he told El Reg. If Ubuntu itself becomes a sacrificial cow, I wonder what happens to its downstreams like LinuxMint.