Maybe more specifically, how can I use Ubuntu “for free”, how can Ubuntu afford to just offer up the OS for nothing? Is it really just all donations from nice people?
In: Technology
Consultancy. At the end, who better to support your critical Ubuntu servers than the company making Ubuntu
Canonical or Red Hat makes money from big and very big companies, they don’t care that much about common Joe using it free or forking it. In fact, being open source is a big benefit for them as other companies and people will be able to help reviewing code, fixing and creating new software and drivers. A lot of the Ubuntu and RHEL shipped software comes from other sources, sometimes even one from each other (Red Hat code into Ubuntu and viceversa)
In fact, Microsoft nowadays makes it easier than ever to use Windows for almost free (reused licenses) or without license no problem. They also don’t enforce that heavily measures to avoid 3rd party activators. Why? Because they not only benefit from you using their OS (as they now bundle apps and on the future ads, ads inside Edge and so on), but they make their big money on companies, not on the common Joe
Companies are subject to surprise Microsoft visits and if they catch the company using Windows without license, they will sue and penalties to that company. Compare that kind of effort to the “let’s make difficult for the common Joe to use different methods than to buy our official 100-200$ licenses”
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