Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Nov 2008 19:08 UTC
Last week, during Ubuntu's OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
from : http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/09/what-behind-gregkh-latest-ra...
If you haven't seen the latest rant from Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman, I'm not going to link to it. You'll have to find it on your own.
Greg has used at least two high-profile speeches this year (a Linux Plumber's Conference keynote, and a Google Tech Talk) to tear down the contributions of Canonical to the Linux ecosystem.
I hope that people take it for what it is, pure and simple...
a negative marketing campaign
engineered by a high-profile Novell employee
against a key competitor
Greg threw out some numbers in his slides, usually showing a very small number next to Canonical, and then much larger numbers next to Red Hat, Novell, and others, such as IBM.
Full Disclosure...
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that:
1. I am currently employed by Canonical
2. I was an IBM employee from 2000 - 2008
3. I spent most of 2005 as an IBM employee on-site at Red Hat
Some missing numbers...
I dug up a few numbers that Greg missed.
* Worldwide Employees (2007)
o Canonical: ~130
o Red Hat: ~2200
o Novell: ~4100
o IBM: 386,558 ...note that IBM's headcount is accurate to 6 significant digits, and the others are fuzzy :-)
* Revenue (2007):
o Canonical:(probably somewhere south of the following numbers)
o Red Hat: $523 million USD
o Novell: $933 million USD
o IBM: $98,786 million USD (yes, that's a hundred billion dollars)
* Years in Existence
o Canonical: 4 (founded in 2004)
o Red Hat: 15 (founded in 1993)
o Novell: 29 (founded in 1979)
o IBM: 119 (founded in 1889)
So, yeah, Canonical is a small, young company. It would be nice if Greg would normalize some of his numbers against each company's size.