Canonical Now Hopes To IPO in 2023 (techcrunch.com) 53
An anonymous reader shares a report: The saga of Ubuntu-maker Canonical's IPO efforts now stretches back quite a few years. I think the first time I talked to the company's founder Mark Shuttleworth about going public was in 2018, though there had already been some chatter about it in previous years. But the timing never quite worked out for Canonical. In a press briefing ahead of today's launch of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Shuttleworth noted he now expects it to go public next year. "We are on track to float the business. And now I'm pretty confident that we will do that in 2023," said Shuttleworth, who was calling in from an undisclosed island off the coast of West Africa. "And so we're taking active steps at the board level and in our finance operation -- various other parts of the business -- to be prepared for that. We're now effectively on a very clear program to a flotation of the business next year."
He stressed that Canonical is not in a situation where it has to raise outside money and that going public for him is not about fundraising. He noted that Canonical's revenue last year was $175 million and that the company's biggest challenge right now is that demand is bigger that the company's ability to service it, in large part because there isn't enough talent on the market for the company to hire.
He stressed that Canonical is not in a situation where it has to raise outside money and that going public for him is not about fundraising. He noted that Canonical's revenue last year was $175 million and that the company's biggest challenge right now is that demand is bigger that the company's ability to service it, in large part because there isn't enough talent on the market for the company to hire.
"in large part because there isn’t enough ta (Score:3)
Canonical is having problems hiring? Gee, I wonder why [glassdoor.ca]. 64% of reviewers found the interview experience negative and 14% were "neutral".
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I don't dispute the rough numbers, having no experience either way. But I read through some of the responses, which have quotes like "I found the process well-explained and overall positive", though the "overall negative" box is ticked. Something is sorely inconsistent about the glassdoor ratings. I'm not sure to which side it skews in this case.
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Only 64%? Seems rather good to me. It's an interview. They are never fun, even when you get hired at the conclusion.
It's like judging the reliability of a product based on a search of failures online. People only ever talk about something when they are unhappy.
Re:"in large part because there isn’t enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared to other companies, it's not very good. IBM has 12% negative and 19% neutral. Microsoft has 14% negative and 21% neutral. Amazon has 18% negative and 22% neutral. So Canonical at 64% negative is an extreme outlier.
I myself had a very negative experience interviewing with Canonical... probably the very worst interview experience of my entire 30+-year career.
Re: "in large part because there isn’t enoug (Score:2)
had a very negative experience interviewing ... (Score:2)
I also had an extremely negative interview experience - and this was way back in 2012.
At first, it seemed quite exciting, heading into London, to see if I could work with a company I once respected.
This was back when they were meddling with a mobile device OS.
To say I was underwhelmed by the interview process, would be understating it.
I arrived at reception, waited 10 minutes, was told to get the lift up to next floor, waited there for 10 minutes.
No offer of a drink.
Then I was told the person interviewing m
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The fucking asshole recruitment agent wasted my entire day and the company's day too. For this reason
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Once again, whether or not Glassdoor is reliable, Canonical is a huge outlier compared to other companies on Glassdoor. So I don't think any Glassdoor bias can explain that because it should also apply to all the other companies on Glassdoor.
Unless you think there's some sort of anti-Canonical conspiracy to pile on it with bad reviews, I suppose... but I find that very unlikely.
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Upcoming feature enhancements (Score:4, Insightful)
Coming soon in Ubuntu 25.04 "Stockmarket Stork":
The "ls" command will display targeted ads from Canonical Partners based on the contents of the files being listed.
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It'd be 26.10 for Stockmarket Stork
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You do realize Fedora's sponsoring overlord is Red Hat, same as Ubuntu's sponsoring overlord is Canonical? And Red Hat has been public since 1999, although as a subsidiary of IBM now?
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My understanding is that Ubuntu is owned by Canonical, while Fedora is not owned by Red Hat. Am I wrong?
You are wrong. Fedora is owned by Red Hat which is owned by IBM.
Re:Death of Ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
I've used Debian for 20 years now. The advantages Ubuntu had with an easy installer and easy access to closed binaries has long since gone away.
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Yep. I run stock Debian 11 at home; at work they run Ubuntu. I see no advantage of Ubuntu over Debian.
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The only money in linux is servers and (indirectly) Android and Chromebook devices. The desktop - even if successful (I use it) isn't a moneymaker. Does Canonical even break even on the few Dell laptops that come with an official Canonical-supported OS? I doubt it.
That's all fine, except that cloud deployment seems to be where all the server money is going. That could be a good think if IBM (or Canonical) could somehow attract enough capital and mindshare to become big players in that arena. Probably t
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Is It Growing? (Score:2)
The next big HP (Score:2)
I really enjoyed watching the decline of HP, it'll be great to watch them turn Ubuntu into a shit sandwich.
Anyone got suggestions for distros for people who don't like fucking around but like software packages from the same decade?
Re: The next big HP (Score:2)
iâ(TM)ve found arch surprisingly user-friendly once you get it set up, and itâ(TM)s not really THAT hard to set up. both its users and critics overstate the difficulty, though of course it's not for total beginners.
if you havenâ(TM)t tried an arch-based distro, consider it. you could try endeavourOS as it has an installer (never tried it myself but hear good things), or go with classic arch. either way the community is pretty great for now. i was enticed to try arch because i was getting much
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The Arch Wiki is so in depth and useful in part because Ar
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Really the only annoyance I have had so far with it is that I need to add a separate repo to get the non-OSS software/codec. Called Packman. There is a walkthru for it. Pretty simple really.
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Then in the late 80s / early 90s, "Death of Founder/s"
And the rest of the timeline was just the most bland and uninteresting things in consumer crap.
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Don't forget about political hopeful iCarly Fiona. I still remember the day I logged in slashdot in 2005 to read she fired Alan Kay. Now HP makes the most fucking boring shit and they compete with trash commodity hardware vendors and shit-tier MSP consultancies.
They could be at the table with the FAANG companies. A few of them appear to be in the early stages of the same sort of decline themselves.
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From what I can tell, Ubuntu is in a decline. The community has become fractured since the roll out of the Unity desktop and Gnome 3.0.
I just checked the date. Yep it's still 2022 and you bring up an event that happened over a decade ago. If there was any fracturing which occurred (there was) that is well and truly passed and it would have zero impact on any trajectory of growth or decline now.
At least pick something from this decade like Wayland or systemd.
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As a starting point, it's a decent reference.
Once upon a time Ubuntu was a fairly decent unambitious delivery vehicle for Debian Testing level content for the average person. Picking a cadence to call it 'release' more aggressive than stable, and investing the effort to be more practical about proprietary firmware, drivers, codecs, etc. It was a very practical distribution for an end-user that appreciates a free OS, but is pragmatic about accepting an 'impure' situation.
Unity was an example of Ubuntu disp
Re:Is It Growing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unity was an example of Ubuntu displaying a new ambition, to deviate from upstream and do something different.
Exactly. Unity marks the moment Ubuntu went from being the reliable distribution that wasn't held hostage by some manifesto (e.g. Debian), to something experimental. They forgot who their user base was. It was people that wanted the stability and reliability of Linux, but didn't care about the politics of the free software movement.
Ideally, Canonical would have forked Ubuntu at that point. Having one distribution that provided bold new functionality, and another stable and reliable. They could then roll in the new features that proved popular in the ambitious version to the stable version.
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Ideally, Canonical would have forked Ubuntu at that point. Having one distribution that provided bold new functionality, and another stable and reliable. They could then roll in the new features that proved popular in the ambitious version to the stable version.
I think that's the intention behind the LTS (long-term support?) series, the ones that come every two years. The addition of "bold new functionality" was supposed to be the goal of the other releases, every six months except the LTS. Unfortunately or fortunately, that wasn't always the case. Some of the LTS releases were quite boring and stable, while some LTS releases introduced controversial changes, including the most recent decision to force Ubuntu Snap Store updates for the default user programs.
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As a starting point, it's a decent reference.
As a starting point it's irrelevant. When something happens in the distant past it has little bearing on growth. Had the issue been recent then one could argue that the fracturing is causing a decline in user base. But the facture is in the past meaning that maybe the user base is on the increase again, maybe its higher than it ever was, maybe it's still going down. Who knows, point is that people put Gnome 3.0 well and truly behind them.
I would say aggressive pursuit of snaps is what has me turned off the most
And this is a relevant reference. Their pushing of snaps is a *current
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It is a good reference. Many, myself included, never seriously installed it since. Sure, I occasionally install it just to take a look. Then I immediately hate everything that is wrong with it and uninstall.
Unity had zero upside. Business decisions from 10+ years ago do in fact have relevance today.
Wayland and systemd do in fact have meaningful upsides.
There are a lot of ways to look at this, but in exactly zero of them is looking back at past history for future success an incorrect one.
Which distro has
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Yeah, and this is a huge problem because Ubuntu is the only Linux that a lot of Linux software supports. If you have a problem with Steam, which is fucking garbage, and you're not on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, it's off to the community forums with you because they will not support you. Same for Civ VI. I imagine that this is far somewhat true for real (non-game) commercial software, much of which was supported on either Redhat or Ubuntu last I looked. But nobody wants to support you running the software y
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On balance I think Ubuntu has overall been bad for Linux.
I don't know about that. It (and Windows Vista) sparked a lot of interest in Linux. It's really the reason Steam supports Linux at all. It's the distribution that got me to transition after a lot of false starts.
The cost of changing Linux distributions is very low. Canonical needs to realize, to build a larger user base, they really need to listen to the users, and stop trying to reinvent Linux for no good reason.
Hopefully being a publicly traded company will force them to pay more attention to user
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I think Ubuntu has overall been bad for Linux.
It's really the reason Steam supports Linux at all.
I don't think so. I think plans for a Steam Machine (which finally came only about 3 years after Steam for Linux, which came after a couple years of beta testing, which must surely have been preceded by some planning time) were the reason for Steam for Linux.
It's the distribution that got me to transition after a lot of false starts.
The only thing Ubuntu really had over Debian when it was new was a prettier installer and preinstalled binary drivers...
The cost of changing Linux distributions is very low.
It is if you haven't paid for any software, and aren't expecting any support. If you do want any, the whole point of my comment was t
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Agree. (Score:2)
Going public will give them incentives to compromise on freedom, privacy, and/or end-user control, in the name of profit. Moving in that direction, though, will put off the majority of their user base without winning over any Windows/Mac users. And then it will all fall apart.
At least, that is what I fear. I hope it doesn't play out that way.
Re: It was nice knowing you (Score:3)
One of Elon Musks biggest regrets is taking Tesla public. Greedy Wall Street fools do not understand long term plays. Also, the top concern becomes making money. If your company is not public you need not make maximizing profit your primary function. As in, you can make your primary goal something else other than money you get off on such as helping the environment or making life multi-planetary.
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Which begs the question....if canonical IPOs, how long before they make the announcement that they are going to make Ubuntu some sort of "pay to play?" And how long after THAT will you see a fork of Ubuntu being made to allow people to avoid that very issue?
Yikes (Score:1)
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The only advice I have for you is not to apply to Canonical. Or at least, not without searching "Canonical work reviews" and "Canonical interview reviews" first.
The talent is there (Score:2)
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But what about their other projects, like Mir, Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu TV and ... oh I see what you mean.
How would I do in an interview? (Score:2)
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You're welcome. [hentai-foundry.com]