When was canonical founded

Shuttleworth said. Another one has committed to do the same next year, and the third, we think, will head in the same direction sooner rather than later. Canonical declined to say which of those is which, per its policy of not giving specific details of commercial partnerships.

Canonical's server and cloud business has multiple revenue streams. The company sells support packages to businesses using Ubuntu Server and OpenStack.

It also sells Landscape , a systems management tool for controlling Ubuntu desktop, server, and cloud deployments. Landscape is proprietary -- while Ubuntu itself is open source, Canonical doesn't make the source code for all of its software freely available. In addition to businesses that provide Ubuntu to their own employees, cloud vendors offer Ubuntu virtual machines over the internet to anyone with a credit card.

Canonical makes money each time you use an Ubuntu server in the cloud. We are quite happy to give it to you,". With the success of Amazon and other cloud services, that revenue source may not be small. Those companies offer Ubuntu as a guest operating system, but Ubuntu can also be used as the host, the operating system that allows the cloud to exist in the first place. OpenStack, an open source project, was developed by Rackspace and Nasa, not Canonical. But OpenStack was built on Ubuntu, making it the software's default operating system.

It's literally by data centre," MacDonald said. Separately, MacDonald said Ubuntu has about 22 million users worldwide, based on the number of desktop and server installations that get security updates from Canonical systems. The majority of those are desktop users. OpenStack is still in the early adoption phase, with first movers often being highly technical institutions like C ern, operator of the Large Hadron Collider.

Most OpenStack clouds today are likely prototypes and proofs of concept rather than paid deployments. Yet "six or seven of the world's biggest telcos currently have Ubuntu OpenStack clouds in operation," Shuttleworth said. Some of them "are on firm commercial terms," and others are "finalising the terms of an engagement. Canonical's plan to release phones and tablets based on Ubuntu Touch has required " additional investment on the design and engineering fronts " -- work that Shuttleworth is funding himself.

Certainly, Shuttleworth could front that money himself, but the crowdfund bid isn't so much a charity as it is an elaborate way to drum up enough pre-orders to make production of the phone worth it. Alas, at the moment it appears that the crowdfunding project will fall well short.

Even so, Shuttleworth has numerous reasons for chasing the Ubuntu phone and tablet dream. As noted earlier, Shuttleworth thinks a desktop business with no mobile counterpart is a losing proposition in the long run.

That's why he declined to say whether the desktop is profitable by itself -- even if it is, that information would provide little insight into whether the business is sustainable. And I think a desktop story, on its own, is very hard to see how that's super-relevant.

Ubuntu phones and tablets aren't expected to hit the market until early next year, an obstacle given how entrenched iOS and Android are in consumers' minds as the premier mobile operating systems. While Canonical can't monetise Ubuntu Touch with ads the way Google can with Android, it plans to gain revenue from device makers and carriers paying Canonical for the right to sell Ubuntu phones.

Shuttleworth said he's hoping to capture the equivalent of 20 percent of Android's global share, and he hopes to get help from Android application developers, the majority of whom already use Ubuntu to develop for Android, he said.

When Shuttleworth says an Ubuntu phone is an extension of the desktop, he really means it. The Ubuntu phone operating system will literally be the same code as the desktop operating system but with a different user interface. When connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, phones with enough horsepower will switch to the desktop interface and look just like a real Ubuntu desktop -- because, again, that's what it is.

In the thirteen years since its launch, however, Canonical has made a big splash in the open source world. It has produced Ubuntu, which is probably the most popular Linux distribution ever for desktop as well as cloud computing.

Since that time, Canonical has evolved in many ways. It expanded its focus to include not just desktops, servers and the cloud, but also mobile and other smart devices. Fast forward to the present, and it kind of looks like Canonical is stepping back in time.

The company recently announced several major changes:. Although Shuttleworth officially left the CEO position at Canonical in , he continued to do CEO-like things since that time — like announce new products and design plans for Ubuntu. Silber cleared played a substantive role in leading the company, too, but it never seemed to me like Shuttleworth had fully relinquished the CEO role in pratice. In that sense, the fact that he now officially holds it again seems unremarkable.

It was never highly successful in that regard. It did succeed in forging partnerships with other vendors to ship Ubuntu-powered phones and tablets. But Ubuntu never became more than a niche player in the mobile world. It never had a serious chance against Android and iOS. As for Unity, I may be a bit biased; I never really found Unity compelling. But I was not alone. Unity has always been controversial. It helps make Ubuntu more consistent with upstream development once again and it alleviates concerns that Ubuntu could become a closed-stack operating system designed to work only with components from Canonical.

The undercurrent to all of the recent change at Ubuntu is news that Canonical is seeking investor funding. With Shuttleworth playing something of shadow CEO, and Canonical dumping money into a mobile market where it faced a virtually impossible battle against entrenched competitors, the company for the last several years has not looked like one into which your typical venture capitalist would want to dump money.

Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO of Acquia , the Drupal -based content management system CMS company observed, businesses turn to open source, because when an "Economic downturn happens, organizations, they have to lower their costs.

So when you have to lower your cost, I think open source becomes a much more compelling option compared to typically more expensive proprietary software. Ubuntu is already popular, affordable and works well on desktops, clouds, and the Internet of Things IoT.

Other businesses will face trouble in the upcoming recession, Canonical won't be one of them. It will thrive. Related Stories:. RHEL 8. Kyndryl and Microsoft forge cloud, digital transformation partnership. Freshworks expands into IT operations management running its familiar playbook. Xero posts half-year net loss as investment in product development grows. Workday adds scheduling, labor optimization tools for frontline workers.

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