Interview with Mark Shuttleworth in Heise Online

[Paul Sladen]

On Tue, 9 May 2006, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> "Mark Shuttleworth has said he takes pleasure in spending millions on
> the Ubuntu Linux distribution"

My hunch is that somewhere between Sydney and Helsinki last year, the idea
of being the number-one GNU/Linux distribution---and it 'only' having to
cost a few million a year---became a quite tempting prospect...

The talk changed from IPO's (ideas about selling Canonical) to publically
saying that one of the reasons that Ubuntu's stability was assured was
because there wasn't "a need" to sell the company.

A few million is considerably less than the 40 billion USD turnover of
Microsoft.

You can also make some fairly educated-guesses about where it goes;  
($quantity of CDs) * (multiplied by ~1euro production+shipping), 50 staff @
$wage, bandwidth, followed by a couple of big conferences, sprints and
travel...

One interesting thing to note is that there are more people employed on
making tools, to make Ubuntu, than there are on Ubuntu itself;  and that a
huge proportion of the development on Ubuntu is done by volunteers or people
paid by people other than Canonical.

Both wonderful pointers for sustainability that Ubuntu can easily continue
even if there wasn't a primary-sponsor.  Putting the money down to make that
happen has been a very good investment.

In fact, very soon I think the number of support, admin and business
personel at Canonical are going to out-number the Ubuntu developers!

	-Paul
-- 
High on a Spanish mountain, surrounded by howling dogs.  Edinburgh, GB