[clug] Ubuntu Backports

[Ben Nizette]

On Sat, 2009-08-08 at 22:42 +1000, Ian McLeod wrote:

> Is anyone aware of any reports on revenue and profitability growth in 
> the open source services industry?

There are some interesting specific cases, eg RedHat:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10305367-16.html

If you sign up to lwn.net (just a few $$, totally worth it) you'll see a
fair few of this type of story fly by.

>   Does Canonical (Ubuntu) make any 
> money?  I could see us paying for commercial support if we had business 
> critical systems running on Ubuntu.

Last I heard they didn't, or at least certainly not to the extent of
RedHat/ Novell.  I think that most companies when they think of mission
critical linux still think of RHEL or SLE[DS].  I don't know how well
justified that is these days, I've never heard anything one way or
'tother regarding Canonical's quality of support.  I do know a few
companies running on SLE* with very good results and RedHat accounts for
80% of the whole open source market [1] so I guess they're doing
something right too.  Between them I can see it being hard for Canonical
to make an impact no matter how good they are.

	--Ben.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8178929.stm