In defense of Ubuntu

Employing someone certainly isn't cheap, and a 2.5 salary multiplier isn't far off at all.
You're right, working from home will save money on engineers equipment, but that pad in
Millbank Tower (Central London) won't come cheap.

I'm not sure about what the $25M you state includes, though. The endowment to the Ubuntu
Foundation was supposedly $10M, so that would leave a cost of $15M over three years for
Canonical. That's $5M per year, which is close to my estimate, but also they've grown
extremely artificially over that time, so their fixed costs will be much more now than when
they were the unnamed enterprise a few Debian hackers were working on. That feels about right.

Personally, I suspect my estimate is conservative: I think their costs are higher than $7M/pa,
which even for Shuttleworth means that they need to start making money relatively soon. By the
end of 2008 he could have spent something closer to $40 million in total on Ubuntu. Is Ubuntu
worth that much?

If it doesn't get close to an even keel soon (= next three years), Canonical could end up
going the way of OSAF: burning through capital for a few years, not receiving the necessary
tough love, and not having any reason to be successful. I doubt Shuttleworth would let it get
to that point, though.