Re: Free Software How?
- From: General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 28 Dec 2006 19:36:53 GMT
On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:43:21 +0100, Sebastian 'lunar' Wiesner wrote:
ChrisC <chrispche@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> typed
One thing thats niggling me. How can Ubuntu send out free shipit CD's
and keep up the cost. You can download for free, you can obtain
applications for free, you get free updates. They have several domains
and websites dedicated to Ubuntu. Who or what is funding all this? How
long can Ubuntu keep this up? Curious thats all.
Canonical Ltd. (the company behind the Ubuntu Foundation) gains money by
providing professional support for its distribution. You can use the
distribution for free, but if you want support, you have to pay.
To many companies professional support is almost more important than the
software itself. They often sign long term support contracts with the
vendor of a piece of software and pay a a great amount of money for it
in addition to the license fees.
Novell and Redhat also gain much of their profit through such support
contracts.
The Ubuntu Foundation itself is a non-commercial institution...
Canonical is owned by Marc Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth is a billionaire so
he can afford to fund Canonical for a long time before it becomes
profitable. In Citizen Kane there is a scene when Kane's banker tells him
that the Inquirer is losing a million dollars a year, Kane replies that at
that rate he'll probably have to close the paper in 60 years. I'm sure
that Shuttleworth feels the same way about Ubuntu, he's having fun with it
so if it loses $10M/year he doesn't care, in 60 years he'll have to shut
it down.
.
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