Back in 2010 I wrote a post about Canonical’s business direction, in response to something Bradley Kuhn had posted. Both he and I were worried about Canonical becoming reliant on an “open core” business model – worried not just from the perspective that it would dilute the principle of Ubuntu, but that frankly every time I have seen this executed before it has been a dismal failure.
The posts are worth re-reading in the context of Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement today that Ubuntu will be dropping a number of their in-house technologies and, more importantly, abandoning the explicit goal of convergence. I would also say, read the comments on the blogs – both Bradley and I found it deeply strange that Canonical wouldn’t follow the RHEL-like strategy, which we both thought they could execute well (and better than an open core one).
Of course, our confusion was – in hindsight – obvious. We weren’t seeing the wood for the trees. The strategy has since been spelled out by Simon Wardley in his rather good talks; one example is here:
It’s well worth to take the time to watch that and understand the strategy against RedHat; but it’s pretty easy to state: “Own the future, wait for it to come to us”. Let’s see why this is important.
