Submitted by “Canonical announced today the availability of Landscape, its web-based systems management tool for Ubuntu servers and desktops. Available to Canonical’s support subscribers, Landscape provides a key tool for the growing number of businesses that want to take advantage of the ease of use of Ubuntu and have previously seen system administration or support as a hurdle.”
more proprietary crap from canonical!
Fantastic and useful product; there are already systems out there that support this sort of thing, but as an initial release it sounds like it could be promising in the future – shame there are no screenshots though
Also worthy of news – the PPA beta release, more info here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/launchpad-personal-package-archive
Basically it should make it easier for developers to get their software to users.
i cant wait to see this start getting implimented. way to take hold of teh reigns!
Good stuff, I’m sure this may push ubuntu onto more PCs in governmental and other larger institutions. A big plus definitely.. I’m gonna have to try it out.
Good luck, this is proprietary software, just like RedHat’s “RedHat Network” product.
From http://www.ubuntu.com/news/landscape-system-management-tool:
Available to Canonical’s support subscribers
There were several notes about this in a news article yesterday.
This is Canonical’s way of trying to make money from their distribution (which there is nothing wrong with).
Yeah, I saw that too. I was hoping for something free, but I suppose they’ve got to make money somehow.
Considering that it’s Mark Shuttleworth’s own money that pays for Ubuntu to exist, I think it’s all fair that he’s allowed to earn something from it.
You can’t bite the hand that feeds you because it has to stop to buy food at some point.
This does seem to be another nail in the coffin of the “open source everything and make money on support” idea.
Canonical are offering easier Linux support, which will hopefully increase adoption. Precisely what is dying in this scenario?? This is a support tool at the end of the day. Many companies are being very succesful in using and selling Linux.
And either way, commerical software for Linux is also a good sign of health. Linux simply isn’t going to dent Microsoft unless there is closed sourced software for it as well open source software.
I haven’t a clue what you’re trying to state.
I haven’t a clue what you’re trying to state.
OK, let me be blunt: If Canonical open-sourced absolutely all the code they write (including Landscape in this case), maybe they wouldn’t make any money. After all, if Landscape is not open source, there must be a reason for it.
I notice people here are confusing open source with free. Though I don’t really see anything on Landscape that says it’s not open source (as in when you buy support, you don’t get source code, but only binaries). All I see is that it’s free to support subscribers. At least they’re not doing what Mandriva does and only allows their subscribers to download the newest distribution for the first month then allow non-subscribers to download it.
Though a lot of these features look like it wouldn’t be hard to cobble together from existing projects, it does sound quite useful. I especially like the hardware reporting through HAL.
Well the place I used to work at paid for the RedHat Network stuff. If this stuff is better it would probably be the sort of thing that might make us change to Ubuntu. So as such I can definitely see this being a good product for getting Canonical more business and Ubuntu more enterprise users.
I agree that this is a service that they could charge for, but not doing so would blow Red Hat out of the water.
It would also be more consistent with Mark’s earlier views that non-paying customers are also first-class citizens.
I would continue to charge for support, which by the way, they charge very reasonable prices, but I would have kept Landscape available to everyone for free.
This could have brought a huge amount of potential business to Ubuntu by making it possible to showcase to potential customers the ease of managing a large Ubuntu network. Most sensible people do want to be able to call someone when things go wrong.
Given that this is free to paying customers, there is a lot to be gained by giving this tool away. It would be a freebie that would make it very easy to turn a non-paying customer into one and it would have made Ubuntu a whole lot more attractive vs other distributions or operating systems.
Just my two cents.
Edited 2007-07-25 18:36
Shuttleworth has already given so much of his own wealth to create and sustain Ubuntu, at this point I think his goal has more to do with sustaining revenue to keep Ubuntu going than it does with personal financial gain.
Second, you wish the tool was free, but do you personally have so many Ubuntu installs that you would need this to manage them? Probably not.
Your home lab is likely not the target market. This is a commercial product intended for companies that will probably want some kind of support when things do not work.
You can give away the distro, but at minimum to sustain a company you at least need to sell support. Given the scope of the product, I would classify it under “support”.
I could see maybe requesting to be able to use the product for educational use (ie. learn it), or test it out in the company lab without paying for it, but in cases where it is used in a production environment, I would question the future of Ubuntu under Canonical if they decided not to sell it.
Edited 2007-07-25 19:35
You misunderstood my comment.
My view is that giving away Landscape would have brought a large number of paying customers to Ubuntu. It would show that Ubuntu’s server engineering is solid and that they understand the needs of large enterprise customers.
No, I do not need this on my home network,but I manage fairly large sites in my consulting business. And I don’t recommend tools that I haven’t personally tested for a good amount of time. My recommendations are usually adhered to very closely by my customers, who would ultimately become the paying customers that Ubuntu is after.
Giving away the tool would have also allowed them to gather very useful feedback about what works and what doesn’t.
Apart from Redhat and MySQL, just about all *sponsored* (NOT volunteer) open source development is funded by either proprietary software or hardware sales; Mozilla gets its money from Google; IBM, HP, and Oracle pour money into Linux, Eclipse, and Apache; mostly Sun funds OpenOffice. The majority of Novell’s money still comes from Netware. Ubuntu is mostly funded through the sale of Shuttleworth’s old company, etc.
But I would say that the majority of development going on in open source is volunteer, and lots of developers use it as a way to pump up their resumes, or get consulting gigs with companies for the open software they’ve help created. This money is very distributed, though.
Edited 2007-07-25 18:58
haha, put my own username in as the title … need more coffee ….
Well, let’s not drift off-topic… tell us all about yourself.
I disagree that this should be a free open-for-all service. After all, Landscape supported by Canonical in Canonical’s servers is consuming Canonical’s resources and we know Canonical can’t support every single Ubuntu user in this regard.
But I would like to see Landscape in a downloadable form, so that people could install their own Landscape servers.
People were angry that the Launchpad bugtracker wasn’t Open Source, too – and now they’re starting to release it that way. Just because Mark wants a little value-add for ubuntu doesn’t mean we should bash.
it does if we want free software.
Just because Mark wants a little value-add for ubuntu doesn’t mean we should bash.
it does if we want free software.
I assume you mean free as in freedom here, as that’s a little more understandable than bashing someone for not providing you with software free of cost. Even so, if you want free (as in freedom) software, write it yourself. You can’t go around demanding that people release their scratch written software under whatever license you please.
I prefer FLOSS myself, but that involves choice. IE: I choose to use Linux instead of Windows – I don’t “bash” Windows for being closed source and I don’t pressure Microsoft into opening up. In the same way, if one doesn’t like Canonical releasing closed source software, the solution is to use an open alternative (or create it), not to pester Canonical to open their stuff up with “bash(ing)” and whatnot.
In other words, if you want free software go and get it elsewhere.