[clug] Ubuntu Backports

[Steve McInerney]

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

Up Front Disclaimer: I work for Canonical

Canonical does make money, it is not yet profitable based on public
statements made in the past 6 months by Mark.
Canonical has a number of supporting desktop/server systems packages:
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/services

I can't speak to RedHat/Novell etc, but they certainly do servers, no
idea about desktops.

You can probably make some intelligent guesses as to what this service
implies, and what that means:
http://www.canonical.com/services/engineering


> I notice that some businesses are releasing their products open
> source and profiting from the support services now too (beyond
> Ubuntu).

Heh. That's been happening since at least the mid 90's, so it's hardly
new. :-)
I personally have been deriving the bulk of my income from supporting
FOSS based systems since ~ '99. Maybe 10-15% of that would have been due
to supporting proprietary software - ie the OS usually - Solaris, HPUX
etc


My very much personal advice is chose the system that works best for you
and your resources; and solves your needs.


Cheers!
- Steve