Canonical Has Been Weathering The Pandemic Well: Turned A Profit, Back Above 500 Employees

[andyprough]

In fact, of the three best known historical Linux software companies (Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical), Canonical is the only one to have had financial problems in recent years.
To my knowledge Red Hat and SUSE are doing very well, however happy that Canonical is starting to work too.

RedHat has not existed as a separate company with separate financial reporting since July 2019. It is simply a piece of IBM's "Hybrid/Cloud" division.

[libv]

. Given that Wayland is STILL inadequate even now, ~8 years later, it's pretty hard to argue that the decision to create Mir was actually wrong: just that the execution failed.

It's been 13ys since wayland started btw. And it's not like X where most of the work was spent on drivers, hw and cross platform support.

[Charlie68]

I think it's fair to say they LOST a lot of money on it, but I wouldn't say it was WASTED - a small distinction, perhaps, but an important one.

At a minimum, they learnt many lessons (most importantly, "Don't put yourself in a position where your largest competitor can royally shaft your plans if they choose to"), and for all that I skipped Unity entirely it was still hugely superior to GNOME3 in terms of UI design. So no, that's not "wasted time and money", that's "doing a decent job, and things just not working out". It happens.

Mir was potentially a reasonable alternative to Wayland that AFAICT died more because of its (stupid, greedy, MBAtard-style) "theft" license than for any technical reason. Given that Wayland is STILL inadequate even now, ~8 years later, it's pretty hard to argue that the decision to create Mir was actually wrong: just that the execution failed.

Which is pretty much Ubuntu in a nutshell, in a lot of ways. I'm not saying they didn't make a lot of bad decisions - they were naive, they clearly over-extended themselves, and both aspects bit them hard when the revenue needed to grow into those endeavors didn't appear on time: basically, they tried to run before they could walk. But now that they're profitable and stable again, they may return to trying new things, and we should welcome that: nothing is worse for the Linux ecosystem as a whole than having RH dictate the direction of everything, even for the fanboys who gloss over all the garbage-tier code RH has inflicted on that ecosystem over the years. (In userspace, that is - they do a much better job with their kernel contributions etc).

I'll tell you ... I was among the enthusiastic about Unity 8 and the future of Ubuntu, however looking back there were too many errors, remember Ubuntu's built-in web-apps, big announcements and they never worked as they should. Remember Ubuntu TV? Great ads and never seen. Remember Unity 8 so many announcements and it never came.
Looking at these projects now, it is quite evident that Canonical was a little confused. Too many projects for a small company like Canonical, their attitude to the community has also isolated them.
How can a company not understand that it was too much!
The last time I tried Unity 8 on the desktop it was still alpha-state DE, then MIR brilliant idea. Canonical is not Apple or Google.
Well MIR was used for their enterprise projects, but why then be stubborn to use it in Ubuntu, slowing down Unity development enormously?
Eventually they were reduced to using Gnome Shell, in a session trying to ape Unity. Sad.

[om26er]

And with more than 100 active job openings, it's clear Canonical is on a growth trajectory. Wonder they got some unannounced investment during this time ?

[F.Ultra]

In fact, of the three best known historical Linux software companies (Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical), Canonical is the only one to have had financial problems in recent years.
To my knowledge Red Hat and SUSE are doing very well, however happy that Canonical is starting to work too.

AFAIK SUSE have never been profitable. Looking at their yearly reports they have reported negative numbers for net income both 2019 and 2020, and 2021-Q1 shows the greatest loss of all periods so far.

[F.Ultra]

I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but in the US -- Smart Companies purposely ensure their profits are close to $0 or negative to avoid paying taxes.

Take for example Starbucks in their earlier years consistently paid $0 is in taxes, the money they would have paid their made sure to reinvest into the company opening new locations to ensure a defecit.

Then take for example infamous Donald Trump, It would be embarrassing as a business person if he paid more than $0 in taxes to whatever wealth circles he's connected to.

The politicians make the laws and the rich make the politicians. Most people will attack the scapegoat and ignore the cause of the problem - the politicians.

I think expansion and contraction of human resources is a part of any healthy company.

I also think Canonical not having a California satellite is a mistake, there are a lot of human industry connections they've missed out on.

Also, being a software company and not also advocating specific hardware sales IMO may potentially be a mistake too.

That is close but not really how it works. Companies like Starbucks still report huge net income profits since they both want to attract share holders and pay out huge stock dividends. What they do is shop around for taxation and place their financial HQ in a country with zero or close to zero corporate tax, then they license out the rights to their brand to their subsidiaries in a well controlled fashion so that e.g Starbucks UK has to pay more in license fees to the Starbucks HQ than what the Starbucks UK make in profits and hence they can claim that their local subsidiaries are making a loss and thus do not have to pay any taxes while their holding company on top can report a huge profit and pay very little in taxes.

Starbucks in particular reported a net income of $3.59bn for 2019 in Washington, then they might have some agreement with the state that they will pay very little of that in taxes there (13% if I'm not mistaken). The controversy was that they reported zero income for 2010, 2011 and 2012 for their UK subsidiary at the same time that they in their investment calls called the UK as very very profitable.

Since then Starbucks UK, or rather Starbucks EMEA have started to pay taxes in the UK (The Starbucks EMEA HQ is in the UK, that was one of the promises it had to deliver on when the story broke) but they only paid £18.3m in taxes in the UK 2018 while they sent $448m in license fees back to Stabucks USA.

Donald Trump most likely did not pay any taxes not due to tax planning but because most things point to him being in actual deficit, hence the extreme grifting that he have done with the whole "stolen election" fundraiser.

[Charlie68]

AFAIK SUSE have never been profitable. Looking at their yearly reports they have reported negative numbers for net income both 2019 and 2020, and 2021-Q1 shows the greatest loss of all periods so far.

From what I have read, SUSE is a company that is doing very well.

[F.Ultra]

From what I have read, SUSE is a company that is doing very well.

According to their latest report https://ir.suse.com/download/compani...FY21_Q2_en.pdf they still have $702.8M in debt (they used $502M from their IPO to pay off parts of the debt). For all the years available with a net income number they have been negative and they avoid mentioning the net income in their quarterly report for some reason...

[Charlie68]

According to their latest report https://ir.suse.com/download/compani...FY21_Q2_en.pdf they still have $702.8M in debt (they used $502M from their IPO to pay off parts of the debt). For all the years available with a net income number they have been negative and they avoid mentioning the net income in their quarterly report for some reason...

I am not an accounting expert, but they tell me that debts are not synonymous with a company that is doing badly or doing well, there are other parameters to consider. For example, if the customer portfolio increases or decreases.
A company may be in debt, but have made investments that could lead to further gains in profit over the long term.
For example, I know for sure that SUSE recently bought Rancher.

[arQon]

It's been 13ys since wayland started btw. And it's not like X where most of the work was spent on drivers, hw and cross platform support.

I meant "8 years since Mir was started" rather than "8 years since Wayland was", but thanks anyway: I didn't realise it had been that long.

13 years for Wayland though, huh? eesh. And that's only "so far", and as you say, it started from a much better position than X did.

Since you're one of the X devs, and I gather they/you are all working on Wayland now, why HAS it taken such an incredibly long time? Not trying to be snarky: I just don't see how, well, ANYTHING can take anything like that amount of time, let alone a cut-down windowing system. What's the piece that I'm overlooking?