According to The Register, who are normally knowledgeable and reliable:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10...oad_donations/Initially, most of those cents came from founder Mark Shuttleworth, the South African software entrepreneur who launched Canonical in 2004 with his own personal fortune. Since then, the privately held company has built a growing international business based on Ubuntu support and related services. But although it is thought to bring in eight-figure annual revenues, it has yet to achieve profitability.
That's a rather infantile way of looking at things. I can imagine you were not the only turned down for bulk requests like that, imagine a 100 people asking for big bulk shipments. Someone has to pay for it. How many of those 400 CDs you requested would have been put to use anyway instead of being used as coasters?
No individual was stopped requesting a cd (or a few) for personal use and their friends. You could have easily told people about it and if those 400 people were really interested they could have applied individually. At one stage I think I got 20 cds but a lot went to waste, that's the only time I ordered more than I needed and never again.
So you burned your own images, right? Or did you storm off in a huff to another distro where you'd have to, er, burn your own images? 400 CDs is a lot, the kind of amount someone planning to sell them would ask for, so I'm not surprised they turned you down.
I never use the download page on the website, but I'll probably fling them some money when I next upgrade. They've provided me with a good product for many years, it's only fair. I've bought stuff from the shop before but only a small fraction of that would have gone into actual development.
I know this because they have not told us that they are profitable. This is extremely obvious. Imagine if Canonical was profitable. Would they tell us?
Yes.
Of course.
The whole point of Canonical is to show that the Linux Desktop is a market worth targeting. If there was a single instant that Canonical is nearing profitability, then you can be absolutely sure they would tell us and there would be a lot of fanfare.. In fact, if there were reasonable projections that they'd be profitable within a year, then we would know.
Since that hasn't happened yet, I know that Canonical is nowhere near profitable yet.
Companies spending lots of money they may or may not have chasing profitability is extremely normal. So no, it is not "regardless of whether or not someone keeps pumping liquidity". The fact that they can reliably get money means that they will continue to spend money expanding their business. Companies go bankrupt when they are unprofitable and nobody is willing to lend them any money.They are hiring, and I haven't seen any signs of downsizing(Kicking Kubuntu development out doesn't count as that makes sense from the Ubuntu flavor standpoint, it makes Kubuntu no different from the other flavors such Xubuntu or Edubuntu), In fact they've upsized(if that's a word) and expanded themselves. Typically, what they're doing now is not consistent with a company draining cash(And that's regardless of whether or not someone keeps pumping liquidity into that company).
Maybe I will donate in the future.
I will buy a t-shirt and the beanie hat from canonical store soon. I hope they make money from this, if not they should get higher prices.
Wholly approve of this, and not the Amazon ads in desktop search rubbish...
Now if they would just give three more options
- FFS Stop Making The Desktop Even More Amazing (TM) And Get Basic Hardware Compatibility, Bugs And Features Working
- Please Stop Merging The Desktop Environment With Your Planned Tablet/ Smartphone Environment Convergence Rubbish
- Contribute To The Debian Mothership
And yes, please give some options other than Paypal...
I will drop some cash into the hardware compatibility & community one for sure...
Hmmm can I put a negative value in the 'make desktop more amazing' option??? :-p
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Dell U2412M || Palit Sonic GT 240 (OC'd NVidia card) || Logitech Quickcam Connect || Acer 3300U Scanner
I just donated because I tried quite a few times to get Linux running but
never succeeded until I used an Ubuntu live CD.
Appreciate the work they put in, creating a distro that allowed me to completely switch to Linux.
They may have changed their focus slightly but the whole PC industry is changing focus.
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