It seems Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Facebook) is not done shopping just yet. After buying WhatsApp and Oculus Rift, Mark Zuckerberg’s next target is Canonical, parent company of world’s most popular Linux distribution Ubuntu. This is revealed in an exclusive report by Business Insider.
When asked about Facebook’s intention behind Ubuntu’s acquisition, Zuckerberg said:
“…At Facebook, we always supported Open Source. We saved $1 billion by switching to Open Source servers last year. We used the saved revenue to buy Oculus”
But when he was further probed on why buy Ubuntu in particular when Facebook could have started its own Linux distribution, Mark answered:
“…Look, Facebook tried to pitch its own smartphone and failed miserably. While Mark Shuttleworth tried to raise fund for an Ubuntu smartphone and failed similarly. Ubuntu wants the convergence between desktop and mobile device and this is where our ideology converged to each other.”
But that is just the phony tip of the iceberg. Apparently in a world where hardware giants like Motorola (sold for $3 bn) and Blackberry (sold for $5 bn) fail to match the price of a smartphone app (WhatsApp sold for $19 bn), you realize its not ‘innovation’ but ‘information’ that is the USP of a tech company.
Since Ubuntu 12.10, Canonical is integrating Amazon in its ‘free and open source’ operating system regardless of if Amazon operates in a particular user’s country or not. Several other third parties also feed on the users’ private data. Even after one and half-year, not many people seem to even bothered about turning off Amazon search and this has only strengthen Canonical’s determination. Few privacy critics raised this issue but were intimated in one way or other by ‘less-than-a-month-at-Canonical employees‘.
“You see”, Zuckerberg winked, “Linux is free. $3 billion is for Ubuntu’s USP”.
When asked whether this deal will raise a great deal of hue and cry, Mark Shuttleworth told that they have hired a bunch of “less-than-a-month-at-Canonical” employees.
