Canonical Pulled In $110 Million, Down To ~440 Employees During Their Last Fiscal Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Pulled In $110 Million, Down To ~440 Employees During Their Last Fiscal Year

For Canonical's fiscal year ending 31 March 2018, the company behind Ubuntu just filed their latest financial documents in the UK on Thursday. These documents with UK's Companies House offer a first look at the financial performance of Canonical since their 2017 shift to focus on profitability and doing away with Unity 8 and mobile/convergence work while laying off a sizable portion of their staff in the process...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonical-Financial-EOY31May18

[M@GOid]

Here is the funny thing about executives: the company must go under but God forbid if their big salaries got a hit. The big difference between the old and new director's salary makes me wonder if it was done by Shuttleworth, or the new director went full Japanese executive and slashed his own compensation to show commitment to the future grow of the company.

[edwaleni]

Here is the funny thing about executives: the company must go under but God forbid if their big salaries got a hit. The big difference between the old and new director's salary makes me wonder if it was done by Shuttleworth, or the new director went full Japanese executive and slashed his own compensation to show commitment to the future grow of the company.

Many people will take less up front if they are offered more later. With an IPO on the horizon, it seems obvious that a reduced salary with a higher stock allocation at IPO would be in the CEO's contract.

[Danielsan]

And people still continue to use Ubuntu to make Shuttleworth even more rich...

[Tuxee]

And people still continue to use Ubuntu to make Shuttleworth even more rich...

Care to elaborate? I use Ubuntu - in what way do I make Mark Shuttleworth "even more rich"? Apart from that: I don't think that Shuttleworth's involvement with Canonical has made him "even more rich". I'd assume quite the contrary.

[Spooktra]

Yeah, I don't see how using an OS that is given away for free, without paying for support, is making anyone "richer".

[TumultuousUnicorn]

Yeah, I don't see how using an OS that is given away for free, without paying for support, is making anyone "richer".

One word: telemetry. With telemetry data, you can make money.
Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...he-first-time/

[xiando]

Yeah, I don't see how using an OS that is given away for free, without paying for support, is making anyone "richer".

Data collection and the selling of that data as well as search engine defaults and other defaults that are not the default because it's good, it's defaults because someone paid to have those things be the defaults.

Luckily the above is just part of the story. Ubuntu does have products they sell like Landscape which is advertised right on the Ubuntu Server download page, https://www.ubuntu.com/server Other Ubuntu-related products being sold commercially doesn't affect the end-user desktop experience so those things are fine.

What is, in my opinion, not fine with Ubuntu is the severe lack of contributions to... well, anything. Tell me, good folks, when was the last time you noticed a @canonical mailing address on a contribution to the kernel or X or KDE or XFCE or .. well, anything at all? Their model seems to be to develop things like Unity and Mir in-house with complete control and no external input possible and then they just abandon the thing.

[vegabook]

110 million? That's miniscule compared with Ubuntu's mind/market share. In 2017 Red Hat had 2.4 billion dollars of revenue.

I would have though someone at Canonical would have gotten Microsoft to cough more dough with all that work they did together on WSL. Or Amazon to cough more somehow for all those instances running Ubuntu.

[Kendji]

Good to see them being profitable. We need them around, as long MS doesn't buy them