Watching the Future of Canonical

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Onlin...field-s-Blog/Watching-the-Future-of-Canonical

Not much new here but ...

 

Without profitability, desktop LINUX will cease and desist, plain and simple. A smart man like Shuttleworth realizes that well and is taking the right steps. However the very nature of Ubuntu remains free period.

 

linuxforall, I disagree. Without profitability of Canonical, Ubuntu will cease and desist one day (unless it will become a full community project like, e.g., Debian). But Ubuntu is fortunately not the only Linux desktop distro although it's certainly the most important one right now.

 

If you wish for Linux to spread, commercial viability is the only way.

 

I tend to disagree. If profitability of a linux distro is the only goal, then that distro is already doomed. The moment you change something that is mostly community based to something that is profit oriented, you lose.

 

So how do you explain the success of Redhat ?

 

Exactly my question, also SUSE Enterprise.

 

As far as I know, both RedHat and SUSE are supporting two comunity based projects: Fedora and OpenSUSE. It's not like they started to disregard the community in order to try to increase their profits, they help the community in order to increase their profits

 

And Ubuntu is deeply entrenched into their community as well, then there are those for whom new of progress has no desire or necessary, for them its time to move on. Fedora has no concern for its community, its a testing bed for RH and it remains so with its cutting edge. Even ardent Fedora lover will tell you how hard it is to install video drivers on it and how ever kernel update gets into a nightmare scenario with video drivers and yet, their community ain't listening, it remains a cutting edge testing bed with all its quirks.