The difference is that Ubuntu is already the de-facto dominant player here. As far as AWS goes, the Canonical Ubuntu AMI is the most popular one, except maybe the default Amazon one.
but dominant != revenue generating. Sure they make decent money with juju if you're needing help setting up openstack. Juju is actually underrated for what it does, and the engineers have done impressive work. But of "90%" of the startups using the Ubuntu AMIs on AWS, how many of them are actively paying Canonical anything at all?
Meanwhile, old boring Redhat just made 2 billion dollars in revenue and is still just slowly improving.
"How many of them are actively paying Canonical anything at all?"
All of them. Ubuntu gets a cut for every instance of Ubuntu on AWS. The Ubuntu AMI's are not stock Ubuntu, they've been modified. So Amazon has to pay Canonical to use the Ubuntu name or it has to call them something else. That's why Canonical is suing OVH; OVH is using a heavily (and poorly) modified Ubuntu without renaming or paying.
Hi Dustin, sorry for offtopic but why not use MATE, you have some MATE developers working for Canonical and I think Ubuntu MATE is more popular then the Gnome version.
I might be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure I read that AWS pays Canonical for a support contract on the official Ubuntu AMIs, to make sure they stay stable and up-to-date with the new Xen versions AWS uses, etc.
Anyway, even if they aren't making (significant) money on it now, having market dominance certainly puts them in a better position to profit eventually, than in mobile where they first have to unseat the three largest software companies in the world, on those companies' most lucrative markets.
Canonical has a commercial relationship with dozens of public clouds, ensuring that the Ubuntu in each of those clouds is securely produced, actively maintained, and at the standards and quality Ubuntu users expect. See the list of excellent commercial cloud partners at:
