until until Canonical can actually make a profit

until until Canonical can actually make a profit

Posted Apr 17, 2008 18:37 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
In reply to: Red Hat: no desktop products coming by dowdle
Parent article: Red Hat: no desktop products coming

...until Canonical can actually make a profit...

I don't suppose that, with enough money to buy a $20 million joyride to the International Space Station, Mark Shuttleworth and his company are in imminent danger of running out of money anytime soon¹. Not that I don't admire what he's doing for Linux--I do appreciate his Linux advocacy efforts with Canonical and Ubuntu.

¹ (Slightly off-topic) I'm reminded of a quote from Orson Welles' movie Citizen Kane:

I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years!

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Exactly... Red Hat too could piss away money... but you see, the are trying to make money, not
lose it.  My point was that Red Hat's point was valid... that no one has really made any money
selling Desktop Linux because the market isn't ready yet... and that until someone does (the
example I gave was the seeming contenter Ubuntu/Canonical) it looks like Desktop Linux as a
commercial product... isn't doable.

Desktop Linux as a free product, now that has been doable for a long, long time now.

> the are trying to make money, not lose it.  My point was that 
> Red Hat's point was valid... that no one has really made any
> money selling Desktop Linux because the market isn't ready yet

I think this is a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of what Red Hat's blog post said.  It
was business sustainability reasons for Red Hat to choose not to create a "traditional desktop
product for the consumer market".  The blog post said nothing about linux desktop being "not
ready yet".