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In defense of UbuntuIn defense of UbuntuPosted Aug 21, 2008 16:47 UTC (Thu) by gouyou (subscriber, #30290)In reply to: In defense of Ubuntu by AlexHudson Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu
Looking at the current market cap of RedHat (4B+ USD) and Suse/Novel (2B+ USD), a 40M+ investment is pretty good. I guess from the current popularity of Ubuntu, any investor would be more than willing to put quiet a bit more money in Canonical. And you can hardly compare OSAF and Canonical: OSAF took over 5 years to deliver their first stable product.
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In defense of Ubuntu Posted Aug 22, 2008 7:49 UTC (Fri) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] I wouldn't be so sure about investment. RedHat's IPO ten years ago raised them $90M (thereabouts), which was towards the end of the .com boom. Today's market is much more tech IPO hostile. RedHat and Novell both have a vast range of products that Canonical doesn't have as well. My comparison with OSAF wasn't really about the finished product (although clearly, with Debian, they had a bit of a leg up in that department ;). What I mean is that there have been a number of "open source" companies who have been well funded but failed to become profitable: OSAF was funded very similarly to Canonical, and have had to contract hugely when the founder decided it wasn't worth playing the game any more. You also have examples like Eazel. My point is nothing more that when you grow a company artificially, like Canonical, you need to invest heavily up-front to create product and services which then sell like hot cakes. If you fail to get to the "hot cakes" stage (and we're talking sales, remember), it becomes extremely difficult to turn that into a profitable business and things go downhill quite quickly.
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