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Does anyone know if Canonical is profitable beyond donations?

goda90 6y ago
Their wikipedia page suggests they were profitable as of 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) They provide support to lots of enterprises.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  They get a cut every time you spin up a VM on AWS, I imagine that's what provides the bulk of their profits. Even though Ubuntu is open source, it's trademarked. If AWS didn't want to pay Canonical, they'd have to do one of two things: either provide Ubuntu unmodified or relabel it and call it something other than Ubuntu. Unmodified Ubuntu probably doesn't boot on AWS, so that's not an option. They tried avoiding payments to Red Hat with their "Amazon Linux" option, but customers far prefer the branded RHEL and Ubuntu images.
  - syntheticcdo 6y ago
    AZ Linux is useful sometimes though, because it has all the AWS niceties installed by default, like the SSM session manager, or the ECS-optimized image.
schmorptron 6y ago
Is anything known that maybe their snap efforts with the snap store are maybe a tactic to get some profit from end user desktop ubuntu down the line? If their plan works out and it becomes the linux app store they could make it attractive for proprietary software vendors to sell stuff through it, and charge a percentage for being the sole gatekeeper to the snap store like apple or google.
- Animats 6y ago
  There's much unhappiness about "snaps", the "store", and that Ubuntu 20.04 is too closely tied to the mothership. Some people are moving to Mint for that reason. Yes, there's not that much of a tie to HQ yet, but remember how Windows slowly went from a standalone OS to "software as a service".
- abrowne 6y ago
  I'm writing this from desktop linux (so I like desktop linux) but the market for linux in servers and other non-desktop uses is much bigger. Yes they target desktop software with Snaps, but also non-desktop software, which is where Snaps started originally as well. This includes being used in commercial products like some Dell networking gear (IIRC), which I imagine is another source of revenue.
pyuser583 6y ago
Yeah they’re making a killing in the mobile devices market.

Their wikipedia page suggests they were profitable as of 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) They provide support to lots of enterprises.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
They get a cut every time you spin up a VM on AWS, I imagine that's what provides the bulk of their profits. Even though Ubuntu is open source, it's trademarked. If AWS didn't want to pay Canonical, they'd have to do one of two things: either provide Ubuntu unmodified or relabel it and call it something other than Ubuntu. Unmodified Ubuntu probably doesn't boot on AWS, so that's not an option. They tried avoiding payments to Red Hat with their "Amazon Linux" option, but customers far prefer the branded RHEL and Ubuntu images.
- syntheticcdo 6y ago
  AZ Linux is useful sometimes though, because it has all the AWS niceties installed by default, like the SSM session manager, or the ECS-optimized image.

schmorptron 6y ago

Is anything known that maybe their snap efforts with the snap store are maybe a tactic to get some profit from end user desktop ubuntu down the line? If their plan works out and it becomes the linux app store they could make it attractive for proprietary software vendors to sell stuff through it, and charge a percentage for being the sole gatekeeper to the snap store like apple or google.

Animats 6y ago
There's much unhappiness about "snaps", the "store", and that Ubuntu 20.04 is too closely tied to the mothership. Some people are moving to Mint for that reason. Yes, there's not that much of a tie to HQ yet, but remember how Windows slowly went from a standalone OS to "software as a service".
abrowne 6y ago
I'm writing this from desktop linux (so I like desktop linux) but the market for linux in servers and other non-desktop uses is much bigger. Yes they target desktop software with Snaps, but also non-desktop software, which is where Snaps started originally as well. This includes being used in commercial products like some Dell networking gear (IIRC), which I imagine is another source of revenue.

pyuser583 6y ago

Yeah they’re making a killing in the mobile devices market.