No, Microsoft is not buying Canonical. You can take the sigh of relief.
Earlier, a rumor was doing the rounds that Microsoft is in talks to buy Canonical, parent company of widely popular Ubuntu Linux. These speculations were attributed to some “key sources in Linux community” and on the fact that Microsoft is partnering with Canonical in more than one project.
We all know that Microsoft has ‘created’ its own Linux (again rumored to be running Ubuntu). But that’s not the end of story. Microsoft chose Ubuntu for the deployment of its big data Hadoop-on-Azure service, HDInsight. Microsoft has also been working with Canonical on LXD, a Linux container project. On the other side, Canonical does not have impressive financial records, despite all the efforts of generating revenue.
Perhaps these dots were good enough for some people to connect and forge into a story of “Microsoft buying Ubuntu”. This story turns out as true as my April Fool joke of Facebook buying Ubuntu.
The same article that earlier churned this ‘story’ has updated with response from Microsoft and Canonical.
Microsoft’s response is:
“Microsoft declines to comment as they do not comment on rumors or speculation.”
Canonical CEO Jane Sibler’s response is:
“Your sources are wrong; there are no such discussions.”
And with that I’ll take a sigh of relief, for now.
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Jumping to Fedora or Arch
Me too – big sigh of relief!
Microsoft just does not need to buy Canonical. They can copy, and then apply for a patent after modifying the copied material.
Canonical has very tight user rights over its products including Ubuntu.
In many ways Canonical/Ubuntu is the Joseph-Stalin of Linux Distributions.
(refer to recent arguments over the use of Ubuntu and actions taken by Canonical) .
All said and done, the source code of Ubuntu (debian) and the apps developed by them is available.
‘after modifying the copied material’ is the cardinal phrase.
The over way around is the truth. Canonical will buy MS :D
It will be a disaster for Canonical.
Unless they open Windows and we can finally see everything that was used illegally, and open it up once and for all. Mind you, it’s not worth it the way it was designed, consciously or not ;)
Open source has evolved and matured sufficiently and the paths of development of Windows and the “Cancer” (as Steve Ballmer called Linux in 2001) are different. If they open up Windows, half the OS developer community (across all OSs) will be needed to make sense of the OS.
Canonical is in huge debt …making no money.
What would they buy a multi-bilion dollar company with ..peanuts?
Shuttleworth, has said he will not put any of his own money in (he doesnt have billions …only a few million anyway).
Ubuntu touch is a rotten duck egg that no one wants and other Canonical projects have still not created any return.
The big players in Linux is RedHat (fedora) and Suse (openSUSE) and Debian, all financially stable and produce a distro that is not full of crapware.
Do i have to explain my joke? Whats wrong with you?
Oh ! was it a joke ?
Your a failed comedian lol ! #Fail
Hopefully MS has learned from the disastrous purchase of Nokia that it can’t buy its way into the modern world. It has to evolve. Ballmer is an idiot, Nadella is a bit smarter.