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View Full Version : Is Canonical Ltd. Financially Insolvent?



newbie2
May 29th, 2013, 04:48 PM
http://www.linuxadvocates.com/2013/05/is-canonical-ltd-financially-insolvent.html
:rolleyes:

aysiu
May 29th, 2013, 07:17 PM
I don't think this is really a news story or groundbreaking journalism. As far as I know, Canonical has always been financially insolvent. Honestly, if Mark Shuttleworth declared Ubuntu bankrupt tomorrow, I don't think it would matter in the grand scheme of things. Ubuntu is open source, as are its core components, as is Debian (on which Ubuntu's based). If people who use Ubuntu wanted it to live in on some fashion, they would have it live on.

mips
May 29th, 2013, 09:54 PM
Canonical's financial details are not in the public domain as they are still trading as a private company and not a publicly listed one. So everything is basically speculation. Either way Mark will still be rolling in the dough even if Canonocal sinks and as he has said before it's all open source so the project can carry on without him.

I reckon Mark is well worth over a billion in US$ terms.

Koori23
May 30th, 2013, 02:34 AM
I'm trying desperately to find my source for this. It was a article I read in Feb of this year with regard to Canonical's financial stability. In short, it's not profitable. That's not the end of the world though.. Profitable vs breaking even are very different things. I do know that Mark did invest 10 Million USD in Ubuntu initally. Who knows how much of that is left though.

With regard to your question specifically though, you have to wonder why the Amazon.com shopping lens? Why go into mobile? Especially when you have major players like Microsft, Google and Apple controlling pretty much everything in that user space?

It seems to me Ubuntu (Lubuntu and XUbuntu) NOT Kubuntu anymore though.. Ubuntu One, the Software Center.. They don't want to sell Linux as is, they want to sell services. Open source services so, to call it a walled garden is awfully thin.. They certainly do want to sell linux based services. Being in the top five on DistroWatch means nothing in terms of the ability to bring in the dollars.


Found it! http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/canonical-ubuntu-linux-is-still-not-profitable.html

kevinmchapman
May 30th, 2013, 06:36 AM
He has been spamming SlashDot and other sites with requests for donations, so this is just attention-grabbing clickbait. He certainly divides opinion - have a look at the comments after this article http://thelinuxworks.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/it-seems-i-wont-be-writing-for-linux.html

Paqman
May 30th, 2013, 10:09 AM
Speculation at best. It's no secret that Canonical hasn't managed to set the tech world on fire, but their actual financial position isn't in the public domain, so those figures are unlikely to be very accurate. Just how much of a cash pile Canonical has, and what their income is isn't known. Probably the first reliable sign we'll get of serious trouble would be layoffs, and AFAIK they're actually still expanding, which means their situation can't be too dire.

grahammechanical
May 30th, 2013, 10:43 PM
What a joke!

Ubuntu gets blasted because it is supported by a commercial company and because Mark Shuttleworth isn't giving his money to open source projects run by people who are unwilling to share the decision making process. And now rumors are being put about that Canonical is insolvent and Mark Shuttleworth is accused of running a business (no, it is his business) into the ground.

Is Canonical making profits. I heard that the answer is No. Why is it not making profits? Answer, the money it does make is being used to hire developers to work on projects that may or may be make Canonical self supporting and incidently keep Ubuntu under development. Souce? Jono Bacon.

On the basis of the evidence obtained by that self-admittedly biased blogger, the USA governent is insolvent and so are many of the other goverments in the world and many businesses, not forgetting the Banks that were also kind of insovent while at the same time reporting massive profits because money loan out was listed as assets.

It is all Monoply money anyway. Keep the money going around and the money keeps going around. And we get paid and we get to eat.