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Canonical Is Still Operating At A Significant Loss

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  • #21
    Originally posted by Espionage724 View Post
    And here begins the story about how Canonical ruined lives across the world by starting WW3, promotes world hunger, killed your cat, or whatever other terrible thing you want to give the illusion they did just because you disagree with the general thought or appearance of Mir and/or Unity likely due to bandwagon-related reasons...
    No.. just this - http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 ...

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    • #22
      Originally posted by jakubo View Post
      i still haven't heard any real arguments in favour of mir that wayland cannot do.
      They exist... in Mark Shuttleworth's mind.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by mrugiero View Post
        Unity and the store, your are right. Mir, upstart, bzr? End-users don't even know what they are. Anyway, upstart was there before systemd. I have no idea if bazaar was there before git or if it is the other way around, but I don't feel like checking now. If systemd and git are better right now than their Canonical counter part is a whole different story.
        It should* matter 0 what was there first, development costs are sunk. What matters is which one will give more value for the money now and in the foreseeable future (with the transition costs are factored in).
        Right now Canonical have cut costs associated with both bzr and upstart, but that means these components (especially since no-one else contributes significantly) will increasingly be less powerful compared to their competitors (currently git and systemd). I would not be surprised if the same happens to Mir 2 years from now.

        * I say should because of course in practice it does matter: Sunk-cost fallacy and loss aversion are well documented phenomena.

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        • #24
          Many (most?) times in competition between open source projects in system, infrastructure and tools area, the winner takes (nearly) all. There is always some competition at the fridge, but usually the leading project in a given domain sees 90% of the usage and contributions, and who is on top changes seldom and slowly. Consider Linux in the kernel-area, GNU coreutils in lower parts of userland, X.org (after XFree86 fork) in display system, GCC in compiler toolchain.

          Which such domain-dominating projects projects have Canonical, "produced"?
          Upstart was such a project for a short while, nearly everyone used it, but it has given way to systemd.
          Ubuntu Desktop (as in the distro project) is arguably one.
          bzr is not. Mir is not. lightdm is not. Launchpad is not.

          I would expect a company of its size, if to be able to call itself a successful open source company, to be key players in several such projects. Not just try to make things that are useful for them, and them alone (not the other companies and people interested in the same problem domain).

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          • #25
            Kinda cool that a company can go on and operate on a loss every year for a decade.
            Sure its funded by billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, but its cool there are people who can do that and who that.
            Kinda like running a company as a hobby and not caring about profit.

            Lately it seems they're getting desperate for profit tho, with Amazon ads and much marketing talk and Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu TV that seems go be going nowhere.

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            • #26
              Spending billions and incapable to implement a sane configuration system that would prevent all the text editing.
              Also, this completely unnecessary CLA crap paired with duplication and isolation from global contribution, and finally, proposing closed source with much higher priority than pushing FLOSS projects and loosing the deal with Valve. Their strategy is just getting worse and worse.

              But they do fix the "Amazon spyware" aka Unity Lens, they replaced it with filters. Don't want Amazon or anything similar - disable the filter right in Unity. That was really good decision. But its still opt-out, not opt-in, so basically its spyware.

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              • #27
                Cannonical did a fantastic thing - they took the technically superior, but harder to install and a bit intimidating Debian and made it into a paragon of out-of-the-box usability that rest of the Linux distributions and even rest of the OSes are still struggling to replicate parts of. Ubuntu and Cannonical sent out millions of free Linux Live CDs to developing nations that not only helped develop their IT infrastructure in a more indpendant way, but also brought in a fresh and entusiastic wave of Linxu and free software users and, later on, developers. Some of those newcomers and some newcomers attreacted by other distributions that emulated some parts of Ubuntu success now appear to be doing some things better than Ubuntu does. That is not a reason to hate Ubuntu. Cannonical do things and people that do things make mistakes; nobody is perfect. If someone does something better than Cannonical then we have two implementations where before we had none and we all are richer as a result.

                Basically all that Cannonical has created from scratch did not have a functional precedent at the time. Or at least it was not know well enough or has some significant deficiencies. Some things still have basically no precedent - does anyone have a PPA system?

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                • #28
                  In the next few years we're going to see a whole lot of change in Linux distros as a whole, that's for sure. I've never seen such a rapid development demand and acceleration. But if it weren't for Ubuntu, Linux as a whole wouldn't have caught on like it did. If Linux never caught on like it did, Valve probably wouldn't have ported their whole steam infrastructure over like they did. And if Valve never ported all that over, there wouldn't have been as many games and driver improvements as there are now.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by aigarius View Post
                    Some things still have basically no precedent - does anyone have a PPA system?
                    Sure, OpenSuse.

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                    • #30
                      If they didn't have to reinvent so many wheels and just focused on bringing the existing technology to end users like they used to do in the past things could've been very different by now. If they took, say, Gnome Shell and Wayland and tuned the UI for mobile devices and added some Android store (like what Jolla did) they could've been already in the market running their cash flow in the positive.

                      Well, we'll see. Valve is doing exactly that. So let's see how fast can Valve get their SteamOS business in the positive.

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