Canonical Is Reportedly Considering An IPO

[Awesomeness]

Charging for security updates does that.

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

[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...

[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.

[yogi_berra]

You mean large and profitable?

Charging for security updates does that.

[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.

[liam]

http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

like that ?

Exactly what does that have to do with what I said?
I'm not aware of a single red hat product that isn't open source.
That's part of the company's ethos that you simply don't seem to understand.

[duby229]

Damn forum won't let me quote now....

Anyway, I agree, it's not a linux distro's job to support everything. It's their job to make what they distribute work. I don't agree with a lot of RHs choices in the software they develop, but they are putting real money and resources to do it. And that is a good thing.

Systemd, PulseAudio, dbus, etc may fail and end up being a total waste of effort, but at least RH is putting effort somewhere. The thing is that RH does a lot of good for OSS. They do contribute resources to good projects. They aren't a bad company. A lot of what they develop is a total waste of effort, but alot of other things they develop is really good.

Where-as the only things Canonical develops is for themselves. As such everything they develop is a total waste of effort. All in all Redhat is better for OSS than Canonical.

[gens]

I WISH they were as open source friendly as rh.

http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

like that ?

[liam]

don't go full redhat

I WISH they were as open source friendly as rh.

[belal1]

If Mark Shuttleworth opens up the company, how long will he remain "benevolent dictator for life" as he butts heads with the board?