Canonical

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Canonical Group Ltd.

logo
legal form Limited
founding March 5, 2004
Seat London , UK
management Neil French
Number of employees 385
sales 95.03 million GBP
approx. 106.17 million EUR
Branch Software development
Website www.canonical.com
As of December 31, 2018

Canonical is a British Linux distributor . The company is owned by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth and is headquartered on the 27th floor of Millbank Tower in the City of Westminster, London . In the summer of 2006, Canonical opened a Montreal office for global customer service and service operations.

Products

Canonical is sponsor of the free Debian -based Linux distribution Ubuntu and offers additional support with the installation and configuration of Ubuntu and officially supported derivatives. Canonical also offers a server version of Ubuntu with several years of "Long Term Support". The customer pays for the support, not the programs. With the “Landscape” administration program, however, you must already have subscribed to Canonical's fee-based support in order to gain access. It also offers IT consulting , training , certifications , legal protection insurance against lawsuits relating to intellectual property as well as the packaging of programs as a Debian package for Ubuntu and works with original equipment manufacturers .

Other projects include a web application to support the development of free software called Launchpad and a proprietary web application called Landscape, which helps IT professionals with system administration. With Ubuntu One , Canonical operated an online storage service, which was discontinued on June 1, 2014. The discontinued OpenCD project, in which free programs for the Windows operating system were compiled on a CD-ROM, will be continued on a smaller scale on the Ubuntu installation media and the OpenDisc project split .

In 2013, the company also announced the development of its own smartphone , which will be financed through crowdfunding . Although the campaign generated record revenues, the necessary total amount was still not achieved - so the project failed. Despite the failure of the crowdfunding campaign, Canonical continues to work on the project. The aim is to build Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu on the same code as far as possible, so that the same programs can be used on desktop and mobile devices. In cooperation with the Spanish manufacturer BQ , the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition became the first smartphone on the market with this mobile operating system. The company thus provides the first GNU / Linux system that is available as both a desktop and a mobile version. On April 5, 2017, Mark Shuttleworth declared his intention to discontinue the Convergence products and thus Ubuntu for phones and tablets. Likewise, the distribution's own desktop environment Unity is not to be further developed, so that Ubuntu 17.10 with Gnome Shell is to be delivered as the desktop environment. Furthermore, the self-developed display server Mir will be discontinued in favor of Wayland . The company will develop more towards the cloud and the IoT, sectors that enable more profit than the consumer sector.

The company supports the worldwide event " Software Freedom Day ", at which various regional groups of users and developers of free software meet. It also supports the GNOME developer conference GUADEC .

criticism

Canonical is repeatedly accused of negatively influencing the development of Ubuntu. In the opinion of part of the community, the operating system is very much designed to meet the needs of those switching who have previously worked on a different platform. In particular, the switch from Gnome to the in-house Unity user interface has sparked a very large discussion in the developer community.

Canonical's dealings with other open source projects and the Linux community are also often criticized. At the beginning of 2013 Canonical announced that it would get out of the Wayland project , which is developing a replacement for the aging X11 display server, and instead develop its own, which resulted in the Mir project . In April 2017 Canonical announced in a statement that Unity and Me had failed and that from Ubuntu version 17.10 onwards the GNOME desktop including Wayland will be used as the standard.

The Debian project has criticized Canonical several times for handling its own packages. Canonical uses Debian diligently, but does not make any changes (so-called patches ) to the project itself . In response to the months-long discussion, an exchange platform was founded in March 2011 with the aim of improving the collaboration between Canonical or Ubuntu and Debian. Canonical itself responded to the criticism by offering to assign some employees to volunteer on the Debian project.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Group of companies' accounts made up to December 31, 2018 , accessed December 27, 2019
  2. ↑ http://bazaar-vcs.org/SprintLondonMay07 ("Where?")
  3. ↑ Stephen Shankland: Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu. to: C | NET. June 10, 2006.
  4. ↑ Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition. (No longer available online.) In: TecChannel. Archived from the original on June 2, 2013 ; Retrieved July 24, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Oliver Diedrich: Landscape: Canonical updates central Ubuntu management. In: heise Open Source. September 14, 2012, accessed July 24, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Shutting down Ubuntu One file services . Retrieved June 10, 2014.
  7. ↑ Sebastien Bonset: Ubuntu Edge: Smartphone with Linux and Android needs $ 32 million crowdfunding. In: t3n magazine. July 23, 2013, archived from the original on July 26, 2013 ; Retrieved July 24, 2013 .
  8. ↑ Jan-Hendrik Heinemann: Ubuntu Edge: Smartphone sets crowdfunding record. (No longer available online.) In: t3n magazine. August 20, 2013, archived from the original on August 26, 2013 ; Retrieved August 25, 2013 .
  9. ↑ The end of the anti-iPhone. In: Tagesschau. ARD, August 22, 2013, archived from the original on August 13, 2014 ; accessed on January 15, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Ubuntu Phone. In: Ubuntu.com. Archived from the original on May 23, 2013 ; accessed on March 1, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition. In: BQ.com. Retrieved March 1, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Patrick Beuth: Ubuntu: The first Ubuntu smartphone makes you want more. In: Zeit.de. February 27, 2015, accessed March 1, 2015 .
  13. ↑ Jörn Brien: Return to Gnome: Ubuntu Linux gives up Unity and the smartphone. In: t3n.de. April 6, 2017. Retrieved May 2, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Mark Shuttleworth: Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence. In: insights.ubuntu.com. April 5, 2017. Retrieved April 5, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Netzwelt.de: Interview with Gerry Carr, spokesman for Canonical , May 4, 2011.
  16. ↑ Ferdinand Thommes: Linux: Ubuntu is preparing for GNOME and Wayland. In: computerbase.de. April 20, 2017. Retrieved May 2, 2017 .
  17. ↑ Heise: Debian and Ubuntu establish exchange platform , accessed on July 30, 2011
  18. ^ Shuttleworth Offers Canonical Employees to Debian - OSnews .