Except that’s not really how it works. Full-time developers need to be paid, bandwidth isn’t free, (good) marketing isn’t free, Support staff doesn’t work for free.

Canonical has been operating at a loss since its founding, and this is no secret. The only reason it stays alive is because Mr. Shuttleworth is pumping $10 million a year into it (which suggests they’re bringing in less than that in gross revenue).

People grossly overestimate the abilities and resources of the community, and especially of part-time, volounteer, non-profession programmers, and grossly underestimate the effect of directed development, and the top-down cathedral model. It won’t last long without Shuttleworth, unless Canonical can become self-sustaining without relying on his deep pockets (court corporate customers, buy support contracts, buy the releases (even if you’re dist-upgrade’ing), you need revenue to pay expenses!)

People mention Debian as a counter example, but let’s face it, the Debian project as been largely irrelevant since Ian left (except for being used as the base for other distributions), and Gentoo although still developed has been largely forgotten since DRobbins left.

To LinuxLover, Red Hat was never “dethroned” they switched focus to the enterprise market, because nobody in the Linux business cares about desktop Linux (Red Hat’s CEO has said that Linux on the desktop has no future).

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.

Shuttleworth has said from the beginning that he didn’t think that something you give away for free would work as a viable business model. He’s also said that it’s his goal to make Cannonical/Ubuntu self-sustaining and that he does not intend to go on supporting the distro forever. However, if this doesn’t happen, expect it to wither and die.

Is this cause for concern? No. There are plenty of other distros to use. Just because one distro shuts down, doesn’t mean Linux stops in its tracks. Users can easy migrate to Mepis, Debian, or even RPM based distros like Mandriva, OpenSuse, or something else altogether like Sabayon or FreeBSD. There are alternatives. In the histrory of Linux, major players have continually been dethrowned. Red Hat was dethrowned by Mandrake, who’s been dethrowned by Ubuntu. Someone else will come along and be a dominant player.