Ubuntu Is a Canonical Product
I work for Canonical (but I&#x27;m speaking for myself; I&#x27;m not authorised to speak for Canonical anyway).<p>I&#x27;ve been around in Free Software since the nineties. At that time, it seemed very much a hobbyist effort and entirely outside the commercial world. I liked the idea of empowering users, but as much as I wanted the model to be successful, it was unclear if it was sustainable. There were plenty of naysayers.<p>Back then there were a bunch of new companies trying to find a business model around Free Software. Many folded. Canonical is one of the few still standing.<p>There&#x27;s a huge bunch of work that&#x27;s needed to maintain a distribution that people tend not to volunteer for, but that still needs doing. Having a functional business model allows this work to get done.<p>So yes, of course Ubuntu is a commercial product. The commercial side is needed to fund the free side. How this is done is a delicate balance, but how Canonical has negotiated this seems to be OK because it&#x27;s one of the few still left standing. Better that than nothing at all.<p>Debian is a bit of an exception, but it doesn&#x27;t properly work as a counterexample because a number of Debian Developers are employed by Canonical whose work also goes into Debian, and the non-DDs at Canonical working on Ubuntu also send a firehose of patches to Debian. I wouldn&#x27;t claim that Debian couldn&#x27;t stand on its without this contribution, but equally one can&#x27;t really discount it either.<p>Speculation that Ubuntu will move what it has provided for free to a paywall or a subscription wall seems unhelpful to me, given that this has <i>never</i> actually happened in its history. The speculation seems to arise, and Canonical&#x2F;Ubuntu is getting this current flak, for having dared to provide <i>more</i>.