Canonical built a business around giving away Ubuntu for free
Canonical gives its flagship product away. The London firm, started and bankrolled by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, makes its money by selling support for Ubuntu, the free Linux system. For years that barely covered costs; by 2023 revenue had reached $251 million.
Shuttleworth was open about the gamble. In a 2008 Guardian interview he said the business model was service provision and that profit was still three to five years off, a strategy often compared with Red Hat's in the 1990s. Early in 2009 he told the New York Times revenue was creeping towards $30 million, the level needed to break even, and that year brought a tiny operating profit of $281,000.
Then came an expensive detour. Canonical poured money into Unity, its own desktop interface, and Ubuntu Touch for phones, and in fiscal 2013 it posted an operating loss of $21.6 million. It eventually shut the Unity team, cut nearly 200 jobs and returned to an operating profit of $2 million in 2017, choosing to concentrate on servers and professional support, the parts that paid best. Ubuntu itself now ships with the GNOME desktop.
Much of what Canonical builds sits out of sight in data centres. Cloud-init has become the de facto standard for setting up virtual machines in the cloud, MAAS provisions bare-metal servers, Juju orchestrates services, and MicroK8s offers a compact Kubernetes. Snap packages apps for many Linux systems, and Ubuntu Core is a tiny, transactional cut of the system. It even worked with Microsoft on the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and its Launchpad site hosts collaboration tools with playful names such as Rosetta for translation and Malone, after Bugsy Malone, for bug tracking.
Not every venture lasted: the Ubuntu One file-sync service closed in 2014. Today the company employs more than 1,200 people across over 70 countries, with its head office at More London Riverside and branches from Austin and Boston to Taipei 101 and the Isle of Man. Paid Ubuntu Pro support and a training scheme launched in October 2025 carry on the service model.
Source: Canonical (company)
