ubuntu funding?

[Camilia]

I offer ubuntu to people at work. They distrust it because it is free. I know it is safe for my son-in-law, whom writes software for a living, gave it to me.

How does ubuntu earn its funds? What can I tell people trust this software?

[sdennie]

Moved to Community Cafe as you'll likely get more answers here.

[jenkinbr]

Much of our ubuntu funding appears to come from a wonderfully helpful man by the name of Mark Shuttleworth, who is the founder of Canonical and has been helping Canonical out, and is prepared to continue supporting the company for another three to five years. - see http://osdir.com/Article10184.phtml. Many seem to regard this article as negative, but I don't see anything negative about it myself, but rather see a wealthy man supporting a great company - something that is rare these days.

Other sources of income include the products sold by Canonical, including Ubuntu apperel, LiveCD sales, Commercial Tech Support, as well as other things. - see https://shop.canonical.com/

[vrangforestillinger]

How does ubuntu earn its funds? What can I tell people trust this software?

As far as I understand, the company investing most work in Ubuntu (Canonical) - plans to make profit in the long run by providing paid support for the system. If you want to deploy Ubuntu in your company, and perhaps integrate it with some of the existing systems (f.ex. an e-mail server or a user database), what better place to get help than from the main contributor.

Looking at a broader view, Ubuntu is just one of many flavors of GNU/Linux, which have many big companies as contributors. One example is Intel, who has an interest in making their hardware work well on GNU/Linux. If Intels hardware works well on Linux, then people will use their hardware when f.ex. building a supercomputer (over 70% of the worlds supercomputers use GNU/Linux).

Other companies invest in GNU/Linux (in terms of work-hours) because its an important part of their infrastructure (I think Google, who use Linux on their servers, might be a good example here).