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What do you think of the possibility a of Canonical IPO?

--jeremy

I have been hearing about it and people have been losing their mind over this!
But really what are the pros and cons of a company going public ?? And consequences that might be on the open source community.

The "first" question; why go public? If you are able to grow/maintain your product as a private company there is no need to go public.

The benefit of going public would be a large infusion of cash; but does Canonical really need that cash to promote/develop Ubuntu?

The downside of going public is that "leadership" will pass from the innovative entrepreneur to unimaginative bureaucratic management. Of course there are always exceptions. A major example (on both sides) is the story of Steve Jobs and Apple. Microsoft is an example of an innovative company that evolved into a dull company more concerned with protecting its turf than in product innovation.

Red Hat is a public company that is based on Linux. They seem to be doing OK.

Google???? Google appears to be succeeding. But given time will they succumb? Too early for me to tell.

Hmm, I see, I think he is going public incase he needs money for the expanding growth of ubuntu based IOT, mainly on mobile devices,
OR maybe , he is required/forced to , for being in the mobile device , coz there are nasty stuff where apple,MSand samsung goes,
I would wait and see if he really does go public or not,
But honestly Mark Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu team did amazing work , without them LinuxMint or Elementary wouldnt exist, even when people get angry at Canonical , we/linux community "NEEDS" a company like canonical , to deal with something like MS's UEFI shit etc~
I hope it turns out ok , whenever there is a slight smell of money hungry corporates are just begging to claw at the chance to occupy it

I question the statement that Microsoft is an innovative company. It's main founder, Bill Gates was a brilliant operator who managed to con IBM, no small feat. But innovation - MSDOS was initially purchased from some outfit, I forget the name, Seattle Tool Works perhaps. Back in DOS days, WordPerfect was a great word processor, MS Word was initially horrible. There isn't space to list all the companies that MS purchased because they had a good product.
I will give them credit for persistence, after sufficient iterations their stuff does evolve into something good. Office is really the best out there, but for the vast majority of us, Libre Office is just fine.
Microsoft got a huge initial boost from the IBM name. Corporate America knew IBM, trusted (which is not the same as liked) them and when the PC went open source a huge market opened up, and Microsoft had the operating system.

One thing I have never understood is how MS Windows won out over the IBM windowed system whatever is was called, but they did.

Digital Research

A short write-up from a web-page identified as Digitial Research.

"In 1974, Dr. Gary A. Kildall, while working for Intel Corporation, created CP/M as the first operating system for the new microprocessor. By 1977, CP/M had become the most popular operating system (OS) in the fledgling microcomputer (PC) industry. The largest Digital Research licensee of CP/M was a small company which had started life as Traf-0-Data, and is now known as Microsoft. In 1981, Microsoft paid Seattle Software Works for an unauthorized clone of CP/M, and Microsoft licensed this clone to IBM which marketed it as PC-DOS on the first IBM PC in 1981, and Microsoft marketed it to all other PC OEMs as MS-DOS."


Based on subjective quality, Linux should have beaten out MS Windows. But, the answer (I believe) lies with marketing and luck. MS-DOS was simply at the the "right-time" to be adopted. Furthermore, the adoption of Unix/Linux was "hurt" by not having corporate backing.

In terms of marketing. Both Microsoft and Apple have aggressive marketing campaigns that include highly visible ads. Also the existence of many magazines which focused on Windows and the Apple operating system to the detriment of Linux. This is what the public sees. It encourages them to buy the products that they are exposed to. The public, as a whole, is not exposed to Linux as a viable alternative.

Dave, I believe the name of the IBM OS that you are referring to was/is called "OS/2 Warp" I cannot understand either, as OS/2 was a full 32 bit OS while windows 95 was patched onto a 16 bit DOS installation. I have heard that OS/2 warp was better in many ways, but I never got a chance to run it