Ubuntu resources vs. quality

They definitely have customers. I suspect, though, that the majority of their income is not via subscriptions - as you say, those products have not been around long enough (aside from Ubuntu itself, which they've bizarrely sworn off making money from directly - personally, I think that's nuts. $10 per copy of LTS is not going to rub anyone up the wrong way, and even if a few hundred thousand people bought it you're still talking millions of dollars).

So I rather imagine most of their income is via development projects with OEMs, the likes of litl, the consultancy for large Ubuntu deployments, all that malarkey. I don't think they would have ever gone down the Unity road in the first place unless there were OEM customers somehow stumping up for that work to happen.

However, are they making much money? I really like the idea that they've done a 10k desktop rollout in Germany: practically every other story like that from other vendors has gone bad in subsequent years, but this is a much more controlled environment, so should be more successful. At this stage, though, they should have many more case studies like that, so you have to think there aren't many of these big deployments about that they're supporting directly.

I also know that they've been handing out Landscape freebies to various people pour encourager les autres, so how much of a haircut they're taking on these various deals who knows - I'm pretty sure they are extremely keenly priced.

I think the problem is basically this: we assume they're not break-even yet, otherwise that would have been trumpeted already. We can also figure out that they're burning millions of dollars each year (has to be ballpark $10M when you consider staffing/office costs/etc.), and have done for the last few years (would have been much less in the early days).

So the question isn't, are they making millions of dollars in revenue, they must be. The question is, how many millions short are they, and what revenues are going to scale without scaling costs to meet that shortfall?

I'm personally not hugely worried that they don't release much information, no-one would realistically expect them to - no private business would ever do that. And as a non-Ubuntu user, the future of that ecosystem doesn't keep me awake at night either. Canonical will be here for years yet. Whether or not they continue to grow, though, or start years of minor cuts here and there and slide back - that wouldn't surprise me. The model was always one of artificial growth to capture market. It remains to be seen if the market is actually there.