http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10455816-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheOpenRoad

I don’t think this kind of hiring can be very good for the morale of the Canonical team. Oh well!

Canonical has yet to show that their business model of completely optional support offerings is actually sustainable. 6 years into the Canonical business experiment. Canonical as of the December 2009 announcement of the CEO change is still running at a loss according to on record statements from Canonical execs (and Shuttleworth..who I guess is technically no longer an executive in the technical sense of the word).

Deployment numbers != profitability. If Canonical’s optional services hold no value to users then it doesn’t matter how large a userbase Ubuntu has…people aren’t going to buy the optional services. Who’s buying Landscape subscriptions? Who’s buying annual technical support contracts? Who’s buying engineering consulting? Who in the Ubuntu userbase is going to standup and say without reservation that they pay money to Canonical and get good service value in return? I don’t see many customer testimonials. I see a lot of user testimonials. I see a lot of partner testimonials…but where are Canonical’s customers? Because its the strength of the customerbase that define the health a business model.

-jef

-jef

Look at this guy’s post in Mar 2008. Can you believe such a newbie in Ubuntu can now be the COO in Canonical?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9889681-16.html

I used to follow his blog for a while as he is the only one in Cnet who focused on writing about open source. But I stopped following him sometime ago because I found his articles lack of insight. Frankly, I seriously doubt Matt has the ability to make Ubuntu a better OS. As a Ubuntu user, though, I do hope he can prove me wrong.

But I understand that they don’t distribute these binaries free of charge (something Ubuntu I think promised to do for ever), and that, I agree, is kind of a biggie. It makes it much simpler for someone with no cash to run the exact same binaries as the ones buying support. My point is that people don’t pay for the binaries, but for the validation/support. So, in my view, Red Hat would loose nothing if they distributed RHEL for free, but it’s probably a bit late for them to change that.

What I meant to say is that RedHat has been focused on the traditional server space, basically selling a much better Unix for less. They have done that because they realized that it is hard to make money out of home users directly (by selling support, for instance, or nicely packaged software).

The difference with Ubuntu is that RedHat has been traditional service, because they realized it is hard to sell desktop support for home users. But there are still some markets to make a _lot_ of money off of:

* corporate desktops
* cloud computing

And, not with support, but in the form of customization contracts to produce OEM versions and support them via specialized repositories, you also have

* netbooks, umpc/s
* embedded
* nettops

Oh well, hope this move doesn’t go the wrong way.

So frankly it’s surprising that he’s now in a senior management position at Canonical. Now, I’m not at all acquainted with Matt and really don’t know what exactly his responsibilities were at Alfresco. Obviously he has ability and talents. But I’m afraid I do have to wonder about his grasp of the entire open source ethos and m.o. of a project like Ubuntu. I certainly hope, in particular, that this doesn’t mean that Canonical is considering a move away from their commitment to ‘Free and Open Source always’ for Ubuntu in all it’s permutations. We already have Red Hat. Ubuntu is different.