There is one way Mark Shuttleworth can make Canonical profitable. Of course, it involves selling software as well as the services they already sell. It also involves the one thing that Linux is sorely lacking... Support for the newest, and best, PC games!!! I love using Ubuntu for my work and such but, I always have to go back to Windows XP to pass the time doing some serious gaming!!

I would be more than willing to pay for software that would make these games run on my Ubuntu laptop.

This isn't the answer to all his financial problems but, I'm sure it would help significantly.

I'm curious to know just what services shuttleworth is referring to. The most effective support I have found is still on the ubuntu forums and ubuntu currently has what I consider to be among the best if not THE best auto-update system integrated into it for free. Is he thinking to start charging for updates or online support? Or is there some other "service" I am missing?

You're missing the point... It's not Ubuntu or any other Linux distributions fault that the latest games are not able to run on Linux, they are developed that way intentionally ("Games for Windows").
Until true "gamers" like yourself and your buddies start complaining to the gaming companies that are involved in this, it will never get better. Please tell me that your not foolish enough to believe that Linux can't handle the games. I play Enemy Territory Quake Wars, Half Life 2, COD 4: Modern Warfare (single-player mode only thanks to Punk Buster), UT2004 (Until the long awaited UT3 for Linux Client comes out). All of these games run very well on my pc, as well as a slew of others.

Mr. Shuttleworth's making the right moves. People are beginning to use Ubuntu more and more, since they have nothing to lose by trying it. It's a heck of a lot better than paying >$200 for final release OS software that's really no better than it was in beta **cough**vista*vista**cough. Adding services such as support for both personal and enterprise computing is the way to go.

Before gaming, we will then need more suported GPUs. It's not so easy to get the specccifications from the GPUs manufacturers.

Says something aboutthe FOSS Model being fundamentally flawed,

if you hve 8 million clients and cant turn a profit and are not able to get into the desktop market.

you dont have to pay your programmers, and you still are going backwards, what does that tell you about the model you are employing,, it say its broke.

free and crappy does not work, make something good and sell it and compete with the world like everyone else.

i sometimes hit comments like the above, about games not working on linux. how old are these people? me and my friends stopped playing games sometime after high school. i am not saying this is a rule, but most of gamers are probably teenagers. so how do you expect to earn from teenagers? but if you really are a game addict, buy a console.

@ Kenney - the pc game market is much smaller than the xbox and playstation markets. For serious gaming get your self one of the current consoles.

the gamers are a minority which is very small, and the gamers willing to pay are even more an minority..

I agree. The Desktop should be free, but to bring in the revenue, support for pc games and the newer printers out there and new wireless adapter cards. I would be glad to pay for accy's for the Ubuntu desktop. I love Ubuntu. Its been the primary OS on all three desktops. 2 years running since i left MS! I have never had one problem with any of the pc's running Linux. Of course they are all on dell machines.

darryl,
Canonical employs about 200 people world-wide. That and the investment into Ubuntu shipments takes some money. Canonical will make money the same was Red Hat makes money -- through support. Support contracts generate money, but it's rarely the consumers who pay for that: it's companies.

Ubuntu's first few years were spent working on a user base. The next 3-5 will be spent on OEM and corporate clients. It has a long way to go to catch up to Red Hat, Novell, or IBM (the other big open source companies), though.

When I say that Mark Shuttleworth (MS) should make a move into gaming, I'm referring to one of two things. Either working with game developers (e.g. Steam [Half Life, Counterstrike, etc.], EA Games [Crysis, Command & Conquer, etc.], etc.) to develop ways for their games to run on an Ubuntu platform (and other Linux platforms). Or have his own company develop some type of software, similar to cedega, that will allow some of the most popular Windows games to run on Ubuntu and look as good as they do on Windows. I submit that either of these scenarios will be very difficult and/or expensive.

As for how old of a gamer I am.... I'm 50 and still going strong! I can't beat him much anymore but, I can still give my 16 yr old son a good challenge over the network.

To make this viable, MS would most definitely have to charge something for it. I would be willing to pay for it.

And finally, as I said before, this is only one thing of a few things that COULD be done to raise the bottom line. My idea would not even come close to being the final solution to Canonical's financial problems.

Cheers!

Desktop is important, but Ubuntu is not doing all that can do. for newbies there must be OSX like, XP like, and Vista like options, and each time you restart the Xserver able to change it.

And use stackswitch or other desktops too as option for start the X.

But it should be a great idea to make exclusive games for Linux, and other exclusive software.

Linux MCE is a great distro, and a great idea.

A Ubuntu MCE distro with a PCTV hardware should be a excellent income for Ubuntu. Even is it is an arrangement with any PCTV hardware builder that should give some money for each unit sold.

It would be easy to make a cheap PCTV, for example based on Via or Atom, with a webcam, and Ubuntu MCE installed. Better than TIVO or MS MC.

This Media Centers - a KDE 4 based version should be better- can be too excellent gaming machines, with links where it is explained how to use emulators, new pinball emulators to replace visual pinball, and importing vpt tables, pinmame for linux, and, of course good commands for arcade games form the sofa included with the cheap TVPC.

Also links to flash games, and of course for all that unknown for the public Linux Games.

This Media Centers will make the 8M grow to at least 10 times more. And then only the advertisement on help pages should pay the bill.

Finally Mark has realized what Redhat did 6 months back. Good on ya Mark.....

To finish off everything..... Dual boot for the time i.e. wait for 2-3 years, once virtualization is really optimal then go for virtualized windows and linux running on top of a hypervisor...

I want to work for Canonical, it has the potential to completely overtake the Computer market.

My kids play Half-life, TF2 and so on on Ubuntu Linux. The final straw was when our legal copy of Windows refused to work after a month. Why bother, Linux works just fine w/ my Nvidia PCIe card.

Dale

I agree that there's not only a market for games here, but not that Ubuntu should be satisfied with hosting PC games. The X-window system could use some modern updating with compression and security mechanisms built into it, but given the growing popularity of online and LAN games, I think the new graphics support in Ubuntu gives it a chance to far surpass the PC gaming industry.

I'm not sure what some of you guys are going on about. Games won't look any better in Linux, probabally worse given the driver support. The only possible advantage could be the way Linux uses less resources, but since 2GB of RAN costs you only a couple of dollars these days whats the point?

The only place Linux has in gaming is running the servers, a task to which it does have some serious advantages. This is not likely to change anytime soon.

I'm an older guy, I use my computer for the Office suite, research, and the like. I switched to Mandrake from Windows 95, from Mandrake to SuSe. My daughter and wife got together and bought my fist laptop loaded with Ubuntu from dell. I am so impressed with the ability to find answers at Ubuntu's forums that I loaded it on my desktop. I know you can buy both desk tops and laptops preloaded with Ubuntu. As for me I'll buy one of those first, so in my humble opinion Canonical would do well selling those and offer paid tech support or have pay per use tech support. I'm not a tech guy and I don't know slash dot, but I do know this I'd cough up $10 to ask a live person a question.

Jatim Lex: There's a commercial support option when you buy Ubuntu machines from Dell, and I think that support is handled by Canonical. You can also order support from http://www.canonical.com/services/support, but it is a bit expensive.

I fail to see how this is news, even in October last year.

It's well publicised that Canonical are not self-sufficient as of yet, but Mark has high hopes that within the next few years it will be, with 3-5 years being slightly conservative, and post 5 years Canonical may not take any money off Mark at all, though he will continue to offer investment until it is no longer required.

Mark is happy to fund Canonical as long as is needed, but he wants Canonical to be self-sufficient in case something happens to him, or in case his money is suddenly needed elsewhere and stretched too thin.