Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss

[jo-erlend]

If I had a nickel for every time that was said... Canonical has been bleeding cash for years so it will take many years of substantial actual profits to offset all those accrued losses. In the same period both Red Hat and SUSE grew substantially, were very profitable and investors made a ton of cash. Compared to those two, Canonical doesn't look very good. In a market were AWS, Azure and GCP revenues grew with billions, Canonical has not been able grab a substantial share of the millions of VMs that were launched on AWS, Azure and GCP. If they had, they would be solidly in the black. So, how come?

Look at the insane number of VMs and containers based on Alpine Linux and then tell me how many billions Alpine makes every year from giving away its software free of charge? Ubuntu is free of charge. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not free of charge. Why would you be confused by the fact that an increase in paying customers would have a bigger impact on the financial returns than an increase in non-paying users?

I mean, seriously; why is this a difficult thing to comprehend? Canonical is owned by a Debian developer who wants to invest his money in a certain way, which obviously has never been to maximize profits. Instead of taking revenues and selling Ubuntu licenses for as much money as people will pay, he's chosen to increase his investment as his revenues grow, which is his right. If he wanted to, he could just cut new expenses and start taking profits and then you would be so happy, right?

But the idea that Ubuntu must be unsuccessful because it's not generating billions of dollars from all the non-paying users it has, is just weird. It seems to me that the people who have come to believe that Canonical is a giant empire that does whatever it takes to commercialize Linux, are confused whenever the evidence clearly proves them wrong. In many instances, the whole ideology seems to be that it can't be wrong, because people on the internet are saying it.

[lyamc]

Now we’ve arrived at one of the reasons for Ubuntu having forked Gnome in the first place: a crappy user interface. Sure, it looks pretty, but somehow Ubuntu had the better looking and more functional fork of Gnome.

Anyway, we’re back to the point where something in Gnome is stupid and doesn’t make sense and Gnome devs just keep it that way because it’s intentional.

Because why would I need a minimize/maximize button? /s

[arQon]

Ubuntu matters. Whether you think GNOME is great, or garbage, doesn't. Likewise for snaps, Wayland, whatever.

Ubuntu's support for multiple DEs beyond the point of just "install this set of source / packages from somewhere and hope all the pieces actually work together" is genuinely helpful; and in some cases, without them leading the way by doing something "badly" IYO and prompting others to do *anything at all* to better the situation, those other projects would be worse than they are, or possibly not even have made it at all.

Add to that the massive knowledge base for Ubuntu - far better than any other distro (except possibly Arch, but with none of the toxicity) - and there's very little, certainly in the desktop space, that hasn't been greatly improved thanks to them.
To take a simple example: even with RedHat bankrolling the entire GNOME team of ?40-ish?, most of the meaningful bugfixes come from an Ubuntu staffer. Possibly because the corporate culture is different there, and bugs are things that actually get fixed occasionally instead of ignored for 3 years and then closed as "version no longer supported", or maybe Ubuntu just hires developers instead of monkeys that produce code by jumping up and down on keyboards, who knows? :P

So yeah, while we know an insecure minority celebrates any problem at Canonical because "teh noobifcation" of Linux means they lose cool points, Ubuntu has still done more to help desktop adoption than every other company combined. And if they close up tomorrow, that'll still be the case a decade from now.

I have no idea if the place is being mismanaged or not, or the sales staff suck, or whatever, but celebrating what you see as a bad FY for the company that dragged desktop Linux into at least a HINT of being relevant after 20+ years of everyone else failing at it isn't just the pettiness of a child, it's ignorant and self-destructive in the extreme.

Luckily, a $2M annual loss is such a tiny amount that Shuttleworth can keep bankrolling it from the loose change in his couch for the rest of his life, as long as it interests him.

[arQon]

Now we’ve arrived at one of the reasons for Ubuntu having forked Gnome in the first place: a crappy user interface. Sure, it looks pretty, but somehow Ubuntu had the better looking and more functional fork of Gnome.

It still does: MATE (courtesy of Mint), and Mint itself with Cinnamon downstream. (Though GNOME is trying hard to break GTK3 badly enough that it's unusable no matter what the rest of the DE is... :/)

[Mez']

It still does: MATE (courtesy of Mint), and Mint itself with Cinnamon downstream. (Though GNOME is trying hard to break GTK3 badly enough that it's unusable no matter what the rest of the DE is... :/)

Mate? I guess it's alright for some users. It's been through all the raw stuff and for sure it's a proven UI. But it's kind of outdated, not exactly slick and modern, or something you get excited for.

Gnome has never supported desktop icons in the shell, but have always let the file manager provide that if necessary. You still get desktop icons if you use a file manager that supports it. But of course, these days, the Linux community has become so obsessed with talking about how bad everything is, they're convincing themselves that nothing is possible at all. In the past, people asked how to do things, now they just claim it's impossible. Who's fault is that?

Gnome's?
They're so buried in their bunker with no consideration for or insights on what their users want that they deserve the bashing. You can't develop your own keyboard-centric thing for developers, strip down plenty of features and then expect the mostly non-developer userbase to be happy.
Canonical got that right and that's why Ubuntu is really great at what it does. They listen. To users, not to the kind of protective upstream whiners looming around here. To the point of having no other choice but to do their own thing in the end because upstream sucks sometimes and is completely blinkered by their own development rather than opening to what users actually want. Canonical does a great job at listening to their users and giving them a decent UX. The Unity dash was of course head and shoulders above Gnome in that regard, even though it was some sort of hack. That says it all.

Then you’d still be worse financially than canonical. Give it up.

Also, why are all of you celebrating when you hear that a company which does a lot of open source work ends up losing money?

I find it ironic that I was called the toxic one for calling people stupid when they can’t seem to see that they’re fighting against someone in the same team.

Actually, for some here, Canonical is bad, no matter what they do. Don't go looking further.
If Red Hat has decided something, it's the single version of the truth and Canonical should follow no questions asked, shutting down any kind of critical mind . No matter how flawed and terrible something is, or how little some projects upstream projects are open to different visions, Canonical should help them, even when it implies helping a crappy project.
This mentality is kind of killing the innovation, the natural emergence of something else. Especially since Canonical has a much more user-focused approach and has the vision to bring users a real user experience (for them) and well-designed stuff, they just didn't have the financial means to follow through and eventually failed.
Yet they're still there, stronger, and have matured a lot in 3 years. What they do now mostly happens behind the scenes (of desktop users) in the profitable and niche markets.
I see this journey to break even very positively for the Linux world. (If and) When they finally are profitable, it will snowball third party interests in investing into or partnering with the company and at some point in the near future I can only hope they will at least partly take on where they left in 2017 and go back to their innovation spirit on the desktop. Maybe with smaller projects at first, not to jeopardize their new dynamic. With the difference of being able to follow through this time around.
I don't care how narrow minded and protective the Fedora whiners can be. These financial statements foreshadow good things for the linux desktop, things that will be in the interest of us users.

[cl333r]

Mir is a display server, Wayland is a protocol. As a display server, Mir was always intentionally protocol agnostic because they wanted to advance it quickly so you would rely on an API rather than a protocol. Now they have formally chosen Wayland as its protocol and use that directly.

When you say that they should've focused on Wayland instead of Mir, that's like saying Gnome should've focused on Wayland instead of Mutter. It makes no sense.

I heard this fallacy many times, it thrives on the technical fact that Mir is indeed a display server and wayland a protocol and from there you try to build your widen up nonsense, yet I'm sure you know what I meant.

[JackLilhammers]

Gnome's?
They're so buried in their bunker with no consideration for or insights on what their users want that they deserve the bashing. You can't develop your own keyboard-centric thing for developers, strip down plenty of features and then expect the mostly non-developer userbase to be happy.
Canonical got that right and that's why Ubuntu is really great at what it does. They listen. To users, not to the kind of protective upstream whiners looming around here. To the point of having no other choice but to do their own thing in the end because upstream sucks sometimes and is completely blinkered by their own development rather than opening to what users actually want. Canonical does a great job at listening to their users and giving them a decent UX. The Unity dash was of course head and shoulders above Gnome in that regard, even though it was some sort of hack. That says it all.

Are you mad saying stuff like that about The Standard Desktop™?!

[royce]

And they are bad on server since it doesn't bring anything to make you job easier.
Even Manjaro has an interface to easily manage kernels and systemd units.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Ubuntu on the server has some of the best support tooling available, up to and including Red Hat and CentOs.

With the hard work being done by other people, no wonder Canonical always has time to invest into stuff nobody cares about (Mir, Snap, Windows WSL, etc.).

I don't think you realise how open source based companies operate at all.

[royce]

How can they be operating at a loss with that kind of money? Is it just by paying off old debt or what?

Possibly, yes. Investments, loans becoming ripe, that sort of thing. The numbers for this year are actually very good, about to break even and on the way to profitability. That was before brexit and covid, so who knows for the current fiscal year.

[ari_linux]

Thanks for pointing this out, I thought it was a systemd service, and I was wrong.
I still find it a useful feature, when I happen to install Ubuntu, the most annoying thing is that after some time users collect a lot of useless kernels.

Not anymore.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS keeps the latest two kernel version installed on the system and mark the older kernels as autoremove-able.
Not automatically remove them, but the users can remove them easily via command "apt autoremove" or via Synaptic Package Manager.
Users have the control to keep or to remove them.