Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market

An initial public offering is a matter of when, not if, for Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, though interested stock owners shouldn't expect a prospectus anytime soon. "We are well north now of the financial minimums needed for an IPO," he tells The Register during the Ubuntu 25.10 Summit at Canonical's …

[JessicaRabbit]

Yeah well all this idealism is going to go out the window after the IPO because investors don't give a fuck about your ideals, all they care about is profit.

[DarkwavePunk]

Cynical, but I understand your view. They have the positive of already being in profit. However - investors are never happy with steady profit and demand exponential growth. This is what makes everything go to shite.

[Gene Cash]

Well they demand dividends be paid right now, this quarter. Longer term plans/expenses like R&D, maintaining infrastructure, and retaining good staff gets cut as unnecessary.

[Aladdin Sane]

Depending on the distribution of voting shares, investors might not get a say.

[Gene Cash]

Uh-huh... and the number of times that happens, I can count on the fingers of my third hand.

[Aladdin Sane]

Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook and the Alphabet formerly known as Google, off the top of my head.

[Pete Sdev]

One might speculate that Shuttleworth would retain 50%+1 of voting shares, thus limiting new investors influence on the day to day running.

[kshaeta]

IPO's are literally, what destroy's every great product.

If you are interested in making money (like Microsoft), and just sucking blood from those that have invested their infrastructure into you (like Microsoft) then an IPO is the way to go.

If you don't care at all about your customers, and are there only to ensure you can take more of their cash, then do an IPO.

All your energies that you have diverted into making a great open source product will be destroyed because you now have to channel everything into making profit, and it will hurt your product.

I do think it's a bad decision.

The next step after IPO is a large corporation (Microsoft) just buys you up, and adds you to their cloud as an OS option. An OS that will have to run on their backend, for $29.99 a month.

[Jimjam3]

It is nice to see a very rich person care about something other than having lots more money.

However as stated, with an IPO you are inviting in the ‘I just care about money brigade’!

[JimmyPage]

Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

The time for that was 15 years ago (and I have posts on El reg to prove it).

And despite howls of sneering from the linuxati on here (which I would normally count myself as part of) I stand by the fact that failing to deliver a proper analog of Outlook was the single biggest drag on the LotD project. Because every time I tried it (3 times as IT manager) the first thing the users said is "Where is my calendar ?"

I'm out of the game now. But never forget how comfortable a user needs to feel before changing. Admittedly MS have also forgotten this, but I can't see the linux community being able to leverage this.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

Yeah, then you have trash like GIMP that tells you you're going to lose changes on exit AND DOES NOT OFFER TO SAVE IT.

That stopped being a thing in the MS-DOS 3.3 days in the Microsoft world.

And I'm not just picking on GIMP in particular. Nothing is integrated with anything else, outside the LibreOffice suite. It took forever for Firefox to even get a working calendar, and that's still not integrated into anything.

Half of the "file managers" out there can't bring up the browser for a .html file.

I've using Linux on my desktop as a daily driver since 0.99pl13 in '95 or so and it is still not something I could recommend using at work, even for my own use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

"[Linux] is still not something I could recommend using at work"

I think it depends a lot on what your work is.

If I were a corporate sales or marketing sort of person, then yes -- almost assuredly Linux is not fit for purpose. (Neither am I in that case, but that's a different topic :) ).

OTOH as a systems and/or network admin/engineer, particularly one who is tasked with looking after a large fleet of open source gear, I simply wouldn't take the job unless I could do it with a similar open source desktop system.

I've been handed a Windows laptop in such a situation, and it was all but untenable. I'm certain there are engineers and support folks who can look after Linuxes and whatnot from a Microsoft pane of glass on their desk or in the machine room, but I'm not one of them.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

It's actually really simple:

If you want your computer to do work, use Linux.

If you want to do work on your computer - use MacOS

I have maybe 90 systems doing work, all running linux.

But, when I administrate them, and want a desktop....I use a Mac.

AND...

If you want to play games, Use Windows (or a console)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

> Nothing is integrated with anything else,

I suspect this is a matter of taste for some people. That is, I can't stand having too many things "integrated". At some point it feels more like "cobbled together", and sometimes rather poorly.

I feel this way about a lot of the MS suite of tools, to be honest. The "integration" between things like Teams and Sharepoint and the various Office tools seems tenuous (forced?) to me sometimes, e.g. like some product manager had "integration" on a required spec sheet checklist so that's what the devs were told to do, whether it made sense or not.

> Half of the "file managers" out there can't bring up the browser for a .html file.

I agree most "file managers" for Linux are kinda junky. OTOH I practically never use them so I don't care much -- I work from the shell prompt and commandline tools most times. Plus the browser -- no avoiding that anymore -- so I don't need a file manager to hand me off to a browser to inspect an html file or what have you, the browser itself can handle it directly.

So I am presumably not the target audience for these sort of integrated desktop suites and efforts. When it comes to desktop Linux, I'm not certain who really is. Seems like a pretty small market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the target audience for these sort of integrated desktop suites and efforts

You're not certain who the target audience is? It's everyone who is running Windows. Seems like a pretty small market?

Think it through before posting to avoid looking like a dafty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the target audience for these sort of integrated desktop suites and efforts

Okay then, how about, I'm not certain who the likely converts are?

"Everyone who is running windows" is quite unlikely to become a Linux desktop user. You're sounding a bit dafty yourself.

[chololennon]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

>> Half of the "file managers" out there can't bring up the browser for a .html file.

> I agree most "file managers" for Linux are kinda junky. OTOH I practically never use them so I don't care much --

I don't know which Linux file managers you have used, but those based on KDE (Konqueror, Krusader, and Dolphin) were, and are, way better than any version of Windows File Explorer (in other words, **for the past 25 years**, Linux has had at least 3 file managers that are better than the one provided by Windows).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

> I don't know which Linux file managers you have used

Frankly, me neither. ;) I suppose whatever Gnome 2.x had, whatever GNOME 3.x has (which I maybe touched for about 2 minutes, as I'd promptly realized GNOME3 was not for me), and whatever XFCE ships (which I've generally not launched since the 1st time I installed XFCE, just to see what the application looked like). I don't recall running a file manager with FVWM[2] or twm back in the day.

I've probably used the XFCE file manager since then, but it's infrequent enough that I couldn't really tell you much about it.

> Linux has had at least 3 file managers that are better than the one provided by Windows

Okay, I'll take your word for it. :) To be clear I wasn't comparing linux file managers to windows counterparts (for the record I've used the Windows apps even less), I was simply observing that I generally don't have much use for file manager apps. I spend most of my time at the commandline.

[AdamWill]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

That's an odd thing to pick to complain about. Evolution was (and still is!) a blatant Outlook clone. It's quite good at calendaring. I've been using it for 20 years.

It didn't interoperate with Exchange very well at some points, but that wasn't about a lack of will, it was about Microsoft trying very hard to make sure it wouldn't work.

[YetAnotherXyzzy]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

I was going to say the same thing. For a while I made good money moving smallish organizations from Outlook to Evolution, and there were surprisingly few complaints from the end users. They wanted (no, strike that, *needed*) something Outlook-like but reliable, and Evolution gave them that.

Then my prospects started moving to Gmail and etc., and I moved on.

[Sumpbuster]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

"I stand by the fact that failing to deliver a proper analog of Outlook was the single biggest drag on the LotD project"

Can't agree more, people just want to login to a desktop and deal with emails and shared calendars.

Powerpointless slides and endless teams meetings..

I wonder if MS eventually gives up on Windows - and just admits that it is a cost centre not worthwhile of any further "investment"

Just make Outlook et al work on Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

Wrt "open source winning the desktop", I suspect Shuttleworth is kidding himself, or trolling for sound bite headlines or similar.

However, if he's got a genuine desire to make real inroads there, it's not only about the apps (Outlook, calendar, the other blah blah blah usual suspects), it's also about so-called directory services -- i.e. AD compatibility -- if he wants to make roads in big dumb companies.

Turning some amount of home users away from Windows is do'able. That likely is mostly about apps, specifically browsers for the most part, and a pretty enough desktop that can be clicked around in sufficiently similar ways as Windows (or Mac) such that your average person buying a pre-installed computer from some big name storefront wouldn't be too put-off.

The "pre-installed" thing is also a factor, of course. Microsoft has an enormous head start over anyone hoping to place their OS on x86 PC hardware bought by everyday consumers.

But when it comes to getting Linux onto corporate desktops, that's uphill all the way. Certainly there are some engineering and other companies running the business on Linux or other open source, but I think it's fair to say they're in the minority. Most outfits are Microsoft shops running AD. The rest of the Microsoft application pile follows from there, for better or worse.

If Linux (Ubuntu or otherwise) can't effectively (transparently?) exist in that kind of environment, let alone replace it, that just leaves the home market. Which is fine, but anyone hoping to tackle the "Linux on the desktop" topic needs to be clear on what they hope to accomplish.

[Sumpbuster]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

AD is just a jumped up LDAP... The GPO system is, I presume, what you are alluding to. If jamf can make it work on a Mac....

Oh, agreed, MS makes it easy for the user, and a pain for Admins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

Seems to me it's a pain for both. :)

I'm hardly a Windows admin, and only barely and rarely a user (that is, only when required by a $JOB), but my minimal experiences with a Windows desktop were painful clunky slogs, and trying to "help" the Admins as part of my duties, by following their instructions and notes for e.g. data entry sort of duty in the local AD forest(?), was a pretty fruitless exercise.

When I asked about Linux systems joined to the AD, observing as you did that it's "just LDAP", I was greeted with a full dose of Windows Admin skepticism and, more's the point: "that's not compliant with Corporate".

Which is the other problem with Windows vs. Linux "directory services". You and I can claim "just LDAP" or whatever other technical views, and it may even have some merit. But that doesn't matter, because Linux is ultimately not a Microsoft thing. Even if a GPO et al solution could be assembled for Linux, it's still not Windows as far as the Windows Admins and Corporate Policy[tm] are concerned.

Basically, it's not only a technical problem. It's also one of acceptance, perception, and (ugh, oh well) marketing.

[Notawhit]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

The problem with linux on the desktop adoption is that most user don't know it exists. The answer is for ubuntu and other large distros to spend some money on a tv advertising compaign extolling it's virtues

[LVPC]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

Gnome, wayland, and systemd are NOT virtues. And keep in mind it was Shuttleworth who started the whole wayland mess.

[hedgie]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

And convincing software companies to port more software. No matter how nice something runs and looks, nor how easy to set up and use, if it doesn't run certain things, it's a non-starter for too many people. Also, getting it preinstalled on more hardware. Making a huge dent into Microsoft might not be the best starting point until that happens. However, a good start would be getting it preinstalled on cheaper hardware, and put a dent into ChromeOS (a real distro is far more capable) as a first step. Use that to get leverage to get more things ported.

[AdamWill]

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

"Wrt "open source winning the desktop", I suspect Shuttleworth is kidding himself, or trolling for sound bite headlines or similar."

It sounded a lot more like 'paying lip service to what Ubuntu started out as and what most people still think of it as, while actually focusing a lot more on the stuff that pays the bills', to me.

Not that I'm saying he's *wrong*. Everybody who's ever tried to make a buck off the Linux desktop (including Red Hat, who I work for) has eventually either done the same thing, or gone broke. A reasonable amount of people want a Linux desktop. Nobody yet has figured out a way to get them to pay enough money to fund it.

[TVU]

"Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market"

Personally, I think that is a wise decision although I do wonder if the "current volatile market" is a euphemism for Donald Trump's unpredictable economic policies.

[thames]

I suspect that it is more a reflection of that an IPO takes time to go through, and the IT industry is in the midst of an AI bubble that is getting ready to pop. When the AI bubble pops it is likely that the entire stock market will take a nose dive.

The US financial sector is looking more than a bit shaky at this moment, with senior executives of major financial companies warning that there are a number of rotten firms (not their own of course) that are on the verge of collapse due to sub-prime loans again.

So we're looking at a combination of the dot-com bubble collapse and the 2008 financial crisis happening together. That's not exactly the best of times in which to launch an IPO.

[chololennon]

IPO = Enshittification

Nowadays IPO is one of the first steps (if not the first) in a product enshittification process, so, what would be the future of Ubuntu as a publicly-owned company? (a linux version of Windows OS? an ads/espionage machine where users must be milked at all costs?)

[Sumpbuster]

Re: IPO = Enshittification

But as I mentioned above, data slurping/telemetry occurs - but like most things in MS land they are late to the party, they should simply give up as they have done with a considerable number of products that they have purchased (embrace and extend) and stop. They have simply run out of innovation - for many years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: IPO = Enshittification

While you're right, it seems like there's plenty of enshittifying even without an IPO.

Not just Ubuntu, mind.

[Vocational Vagabond]

just not 'with our trousers around our ankles'

erm no.. they'd prefer to wait till their customers' "pants are around their ankles" . . with their data hanging out is more like it, It'll make their data telemetry that much richer than it is now, and at that point, they'll not be confined to hacking advertising into your MOTD ... I can just about hear the screams of the 'Dev Darlings' now.

[BasicReality]

There is absolutely no need for them to do an IPO. Why do companies think that at a certain point they have to do it? What’s wrong with keeping the company privately owned?

[doublelayer]

Because, by doing an IPO, they and/or the company get more money. They can use that to either fund projects they didn't have the budget for or to have more money of their own. You can keep a company private if you don't need it to grow or have a plan for how you're going to grow it while staying private, but sometimes, an IPO is the easiest way of getting money quickly and sometimes, there are things you can't do unless you get money quickly. I don't know what Canonical would want to do with that, but several things I think we'd appreciate would probably not be possible without it*.

Also, a lot of people who found companies aren't as fortunate as Shuttleworth and intend to make some money from doing so. This may not apply to Canonical, but it's not that unreasonable for someone to found a business with the hope that they will make money at the end of it, and an IPO is a technique for getting that money without simply liquidating the business. Before adding another IPO = destruction comment, know that the alternative for people wanting to leave their company and get paid for doing so is selling the entire thing, and I'm not sure you would like any of the companies that would bid for it.

* To pick a single example, and almost certainly not a thing they're ever going to do, I'd quite like a working open smartphone. Canonical tried that. It failed. They never got the software fully working and they didn't have hardware. But, if they felt it was worth it, raising a lot of capital would allow them to hire people to write that software fully and get hardware they can make sure will run it. We can see what happens if you try it the private company way; we have existing Linux smartphones which have old, underpowered hardware, take years to become available, and run software that can't do basic things and would be unsuitable for all but ardent fans of the concept. Unless a million people suddenly get interested enough in the idea and pledge preorders, the resources to fix that problem would not show up with another private effort.

[O'Reg Inalsin]

Canonical is now focused on Ubuntu plus other software in containers for the cloud.

Canonical has shifted emphasis from desktop to cloud containerization, which is where they are making money. I quit Ubuntu desktop after they closed the backdoor to allow installation on pre-encrypted disk - you now have to tell the key to the Ubuntu installer and let it encrypt the disk for you. Also, they no longer offer packaging support for the entire "supported" duration of a release - after a certain date if you want to install "tree", for example, you are instructed to install the tree snap package. Canonical no longer really care about desktop, and anyway, Debian now "just works".

[Blackjack]

First time in a long while that I agree with something this company says or does.

[CAPS LOCK]

I'm surprised that...

... Microsoft hasn't picked up Canonical already. They do seem very chummy...