Canonical Ltd.
Canonical is a British Linux distributor. The company is owned by the South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth and has its headquarters on the 27th floor of the Millbank Tower in London's City of Westminster. In summer 2006 Canonical opened an office in Montreal for global support and service operation.
Products
Canonical is sponsoring the Debian-based Linux distribution Ubuntu, and also offers support for the installation and configuration of Ubuntu and officially supported derivatives to. Canonical tries to put a server version of Ubuntu with several years of " Long Term Support " on the market. The customer pays for the support, not for the programs. The management program "Landscape" but you have already subscribe to the paid support from Canonical to gain access. In addition, it offers IT consulting, training, certification, legal expenses insurance against lawsuits by Intellectual Property and packet assembling of programs as a Debian package for Ubuntu, and works with OEMs together.
Other projects of Canonical Ltd.. are the free version management program Bazaar, a web application to assist in the development of free software called Launchpad and a proprietary web application called Landscape, IT professionals will assist in system administration. With Ubuntu One, Canonical operates an online storage service. The set OpenCD project was compiled with the free programs for the Windows operating system on a CD- ROM, will be continued on a smaller scale on the Ubuntu installation media and the project splitting Opendisc. The company also announced the development of its own smartphones, which is funded by crowdfunding. With the campaign, although revenue at record levels were achieved, the necessary total amount but still not achieved - so the project failed.
The company supports the global event "Software Freedom Day " in which meet various regional groups of users and developers of free programs. In addition, it supports the GNOME developers conference GUADEC.
Criticism
Canonical is repeatedly accused of influencing the development of Ubuntu negative. According to a part of the community, the operating system is very heavily designed to meet the needs of transit passengers who have previously worked on a different platform. In particular, the change from Gnome to own Unity interface has triggered a huge debate in the developer community.
Also Canonical dealing with other open source projects and the Linux community is often criticized. Beginning of 2013 announced that Canonical, from the project Wayland, which is developing a replacement for the outdated years X11 display server to get out and instead to develop their own, resulting in the project I was born.
The Debian project has repeatedly been criticized for dealing with their own packages Canonical. Operating the Canonical Although diligent in Debian, run itself back but hardly changes ( called patches ) to the project. In response to the months-long discussion was founded an exchange platform in March 2011, with the cooperation between Canonical or Ubuntu and Debian to be improved. Canonical itself has responded to the criticism with the offer to bring some employees for voluntary work on the Debian project.