
Staff and projects cut as Canonical tries to lure investors - jwildeboer
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/06/canonical_cuts_jobs_with_unity_bullet/
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sandGorgon
I hope they get rid of the bzr versioning tool for their project management
and adopt git. It's far more compatible with upstream - there's a significant
effort to just syncing between git and bzr.

Yes, there is already some support, but not at feature parity to bzr.
[https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git](https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git)

I am impressed at how much of a community Launchpad has built, _inspite_ of
bazaar.

~~~
marten-de-vries
Launchpad still has a couple of very nice features you do not see at e.g.
Github, in particular for desktop-oriented software:

\- Built-in translation support; there's a big community that can (and, in my
experience, will!) help you translate your project's .pot files using
Launchpad's interface. It also has auto-import and -export of files from the
source repository.

\- Build recipes; this allows you to build .deb packages for your project, and
to put them in a PPA which makes them easily testable for Ubuntu users.

\- Detailed progress tracking functionality; using releases, milestones, a
nice bug tracker & blueprints.

While I've in the past used Bazaar in conjunction with Launchpad, I'm happy to
see them make the switch to Git. With its larger development community and
popularity, it's a natural choice. Just a shame it isn't as well integrated
yet.

~~~
sandGorgon
Launchpad is definitely nice. Bzr is the problem. I would go as far as saying
that a lot of the ui flows from how bzr (and the lp tool behaves).

I really hope they drop bzr and move to git.

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dorfsmay
Investors will want to see more revenues. I always wondered why Canonical
doesn't offer a small subscription fee for slow-email-only tech support. Make
it a reasonable price and I suspect a lot of people would be willing to pay.

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scorpioxy
I wonder why would they need investors? Investors would be looking for some
form of exit. What would Canonical, a primarily services company offer in
terms of an exit for any investor?

I understand that IoT and cloud deployments is the "next big thing" but the
competition is incredibly fierce with players that have deep pockets.

~~~
jacquesm
Not every class of investor is looking for an exit.

~~~
scholia
Nonetheless, I would assume investors are looking to make a profit at some
point. And as far as I know, Canonical has never made a profit, nor come
anywhere near it. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any circumstances where it
would make a profit from desktop Linux.

For the record, Canonical was worth -£4.1 million in 2010 and it's now worth
-£59.4 million. It has £22.2 million in cash and liabilities of -£326.6
million. [1] If it was a commercial operation rather than a millionaire's
plaything, it would have closed a decade ago.

[1] [https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-
GROUP-...](https://companycheck.co.uk/company/06870835/CANONICAL-GROUP-
LIMITED/financials)

~~~
jacquesm
I'd be happy to invest without expecting _any_ return on my investment. I've
done so a couple of times with other companies in the past and for the most
part I'm perfectly ok with the outcome.

Just like you would donate money to a charity you might decide to buy some
stock in a company at IPO because you simply want to support their cause. It's
also one of the reasons I bought an Ubuntu phone, I played around with it for
a bit and ended up not using it because I'm too easily distracted.

If you're always looking for a return on every investment then you would have
to decide against a lot of groups looking for money that need a shot in the
arm in order to achieve their dreams, even if those dreams ultimately fail the
road to that failed dream may yield useful spin-offs.

Investing is not all that black-and-white, and it is in general very hard to
impossible to know which investments will yield a future return and which do
not.

Investors that buy stock have fairly little say in the direction of the
company until they achieve major interests, as such you're essentially along
for the ride and if anything ever comes of it that is at the discretion of the
majority interests in the company.

And once you have a majority interest you essentially own the company rather
than that you are just an investor you are now at the helm.

Even VCs, who are arguably always looking for a profitable exit have no way to
force such an exit other than to find a suitable partner and to activate what
is known as a 'drag along' clause in the shareholder agreement (assuming that
such an entry is present).

If they can't or that clause isn't there they are simply captive and will have
to accept whatever dividend payments (or none) are issued by the company if
the company ever turns a profit.

Canonical is a company that I think deserves a lot of praise and support for
what they've done, even if it isn't the financial success that they might have
hoped to achieve.

Obviously, given the fact that their product has been powering my desktop ever
since I dropped 'Knoppix' makes me biased.

~~~
scholia
If you're just giving money to a company like Canonical then surely it's a
donation rather than an investment. Maybe Shuttleworth should just make it a
charity and invite donations.

I would _guess_ that Canonical's current strategy is doomed because the cost
of providing support (which depends on human wage rates) is rising faster than
charges. [1] I can't see that changing unless someone develops an AI that can
support Linux.

[1] Be interested to hear contrary views from people who are actually involved
in delivering software support, which I am not.

~~~
toyg
You don't need an AI, "just" increased tracking and data analysis to improve
troubleshooting, like MS and Google do. Unfortunately, Ubuntu caters to a
community that is very much adversed to the idea.

Another alternative is to dramatically restrict support for hardware
configurations, like Apple does, and let the community deal with the rest.
There would be some backlash but it probably wouldn't be lethal.

To be honest I don't think support is the problem anyway. The problem is that
monetization channels are not materializing at the necessary volumes. RedHat
"is" Linux in the enterprise datacentre, where the big money is. Ubuntu seems
to rule the virtual-machine arena, which is a world of cheapskate corner-
cutting startups; and personal desktops, which are fully commoditized. Their
saas offerings have failed, and there are limits to what they can extract from
iaas providers. Where can they find real money?

If I were Shuttleworth I'd try again with integrated services, but by
acquisition and with better targeting. Ubuntu users are geeks, they won't pay
you to save a few holiday pics. Buy and integrate dev-oriented services like
spideroak and tarsnap; build some revenue-generating agreement with Jetbrains,
Microsoft, Oracle etc to integrate their tools on Ubuntu; build a real
appstore (i think they are working on something like that). This stuff won't
generate bazillion dollars, but could create the space to find that one or two
killer features that people will pay good money for.

~~~
scholia
Thanks: good points.

I as assuming that Canonical support would mainly have to tackle pretty tough
problems, because users will solve the simpler ones themselves. That's very
unlike Windows support, where quite a lot of people get stumped by trivia.

I have met various Canonical staff in the past and they seem like nice guys,
but I've never understood how they thought they could make enough money to
support 600 to 700 staff. I don't see that there's much they can do that Red
Hat can't do, and Red Hat had a 10-year head start....

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keithpeter
So potentially between 240 and 420 people going and a good proportion of those
will be developers or at least technically skilled. I recollect that Canonical
had a remote workforce so locations of the people being made redundant will be
distributed in various job markets. Good luck to them!

~~~
jononor
Yes, lots of skilled people now need to find something new. Hope we see some
new projects/companies come out also!

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tombert
While I do not fault Canonical at all for these decisions, I find it a little
disappointing whenever I am reminded that a Free Software project is under the
same constraints as any other company, and as a result needs money.

I wish Canonical and the Ubuntu team the best of luck, though I worry that
that might not be enough.

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a3n
> "No part of the business had sacred cows," he told El Reg.

If Ubuntu itself becomes a sacrificial cow, I wonder what happens to its
downstreams like LinuxMint.

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dingdingdang
Goodbye to Unity then.

~~~
mverwijs
As announced by Mark Shuttleworth this week, Gnome will be back as default in
Ubuntu 18.04.

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tmsldd
That makes sense...

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jwildeboer
FTR Mods changed the headline. Don't blame me as OP for that :-)

~~~
jacquesm
What was your title?

