Canonical Is Reportedly Considering An IPO

[Delgarde]

Hmm seems I need to check Red Hat's stock prices. Never did I believe, but why not buy Canonical if there's money to make...

They're not very comparable companies though. Red Hat are best known as a Linux distro, but they've got a lot of peripheral stuff too... they've got a lot of influence in Java enterprise development, cloud hosting, storage, etc... lots of infrastructure pieces they've acquired over the years. As such, they've got reliable revenue from a variety of sources - whereas Canonical is still a small player despite the success of Ubuntu as a distribution.

[yogi_berra]

You mean large and profitable?

Charging for security updates does that.

[duby229]

Charging for security updates does that.

It's all part of support contracts. That's where the real money is. If you are a services company and you want to be profitable, then you need those contracts. Redhats business is different from mine, but I got most of my support contracts on new hardware sales. And I still make some money on them while they get guarantees. Those include applying security updates.

[MartinN]

ROTFLMAO.... Let me fix that headline - "Canonical will be resting in Mir soon". Might be good for those who sell short to have that IPO tho...

[Awesomeness]

Charging for security updates does that.

I never paid a dime for any update in Fedora or CentOS.