

Mark Shuttleworth Considering Canonical IPO - testrun
http://www.zdnet.com/article/mark-shuttleworth-considering-canonical-ipo/

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chimeracoder
It's somewhat amusing to see this right underneath the Dell headline on the HN
frontpage about running Linux on your Dell. Dell recently went private again
in an LBO after being public for 25 years, and now they're easily the most
Linux-friendly large manufacturer of computers in the US.

IBM may have held that title for the Thinkpad at one point, but that's
definitely becoming less and less true as Lenovo runs the Thinkpad line into
the ground[0]

[0] Source: Typing this from my Thinkpad running Debian.

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ChuckMcM
I observed that as a private company Dell was much more willing to embrace
alternate architectures from AMD and Linux as an OS. Which really makes you
wonder doesn't it? How does being publicly traded make you so coercible? I get
the executive team has compensation tied to share price kind of arguments but
Dell seems have done much better post LBO. What can they do now that they
couldn't do then? And why? Looking forward to that HBR article if it ever gets
written.

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tdicola
Public companies have a fiduciary responsibility to show their shareholders
growth every 4 months. Private companies can do absolutely anything as long as
they're paying their bills and not breaking any laws.

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simonebrunozzi
I'm sure you meant "every quarter" or "every 3 months".

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gbersac
He expect Ubuntu phone to be profitable...I don't know how he expects it to
have a place between android, Windows phone and iOs. Even blackberry, with far
more experience in the field, is struggling.

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jkot
If phone can run full ubuntu stack, it will find couple of million users for
sure.

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objclxt
A couple of million users doesn't mean it's profitable by any means.

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hueving
I wonder if this is the type of IPO where the employees get nothing since it
was always pitched as a company with no 'exit plan'.

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JupiterMoon
Why would employees get anything? They should be getting their salaries both
before and after.

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NateDad
I've heard that Mark has money put away in the event of an IPO to reward
employees for their loyalty (based on seniority), but I have no way of
verifying that.

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cmsj
This story is from last week and Mark subsequently clarified to say that he's
not taking the company public.

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NateDad
Source?

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cmsj
hmm, apparently I can't find the thing I thought I'd read about that, so I
retract. I guess the IPO is on!

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davidgerard
If only XFCE wasn't so bloody ugly on Debian ...

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bittercynic
LXDE is very beautiful on Debian, though, and also reasonably fast and light.

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davidgerard
YMMV. I tried LXDE on Debian a few years ago and found it was simplified just
that bit too far. I did appreciate that when I tried to set the clock to show
seconds, it (literally) told me to look up "man 3 strftime". It's sorta
heartwarming to know that level of curmudgeonly user-hostility can still be
found in the wild.

~~~
bittercynic
It is user friendly to users who like the desktop environment to stay out of
the way, and to stay the same year after year so that we can just bring our
~/.config/lx* over to a new system and have things set up the way we're used
to.

LXDE may not be for everyone, but the desktop environments that try to appeal
to the broadest audience can seem pretty user-hostile to me.

~~~
davidgerard
Can't wait till I have a phone that friendly.

[http://newstechnica.com/2008/09/22/free-software-
foundation-...](http://newstechnica.com/2008/09/22/free-software-foundation-
announces-gnuphone/)

