> For servers, I believe Ubuntu surpassed Debian in popularity recently

You're probably correct, but man is that a sign of our industry's immaturity. Debian is a stable and free platform on which to build a product. Ubuntu is a fine end-user distro, but it is neither as stable nor as free as Debian.

I am truly sad when OpenSUSE and SUSE isn't in the conversation about stability and popularity for servers. They have been rock solid give you the option of a rolling release and paid support if you want it.

What is unstable about it? I have used it in 3 fortune 500 companies in production and it was great.

Ubuntu has a fixed update schedule - for a business, "predictable" often beats "good"

Ubuntu is not default at any of the top three providers.

I don't think Amazon EC2 and Azure Compute have a default per se, though Amazon does support and maintain Amazon Linux (in the RHEL/CentOS family) in a way it doesn't do with any other distribution.

Google Compute Engine defaults to Debian.

Of course, all three make it easy to use most of the major distros including Ubuntu (and Debian). Google's GCP support contracts will even support the images for all distros which they publish directly as well as certain partner-published images.

(Disclosure: I previously worked at Google on the GCE team, including much of the work to launch Google's Debian images and collaborating with Canonical to validate and help launch their GCE Ubuntu images. I have not worked for Google since 2015 but am still involved in Debian's public cloud efforts in other capacities.)

The article gives stats that Ubuntu server is 10x more popular than RHEL on AWS. Doesn't take Fedora/CentOS into account, but still significant.

Sure, I'd believe that. Neither Ubuntu not RHEL is the default on AWS, but it's clear Ubuntu is popular in that environment. (Most of RHEL's paid subscription base is still on-premises, I suspect.)

That doesn't mean Canonical gets paid whenever someone spins up an Ubuntu VM. AFAIK there is no public info about Canonical revenue anyway

Canonical very definitely gets paid every time someone spins up an Ubuntu VM on AWS or any other cloud provider. Not much, perhaps, but there are a lot of Ubuntu VM's spun up.

AWS doesn't necessarily have to pay Canonical for Ubuntu VM's, but if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to use the trademark "Ubuntu".

OVH wasn't paying Canonical, got sued because of it, and had to settle.

In the OVH case, a modified kernel was being shipped without (apparently) following the guidelines. I've seen an AWS suffix on kernel upgrades and they may or may not have an agreement to pay, but I'm thinking _very definitely_ is stated too strongly.

Ah, interesting. So they basically sell the right to use their trademark?

They also supply support and custom images.

No, see the simbling reply.

There are some info about Canonical's revenues at https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonica...

Full accounts at https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05055134/filing-h...

If they'll make an IPO next year they'll have to tell us how they are making money. Just wait and see.

So, 125 Million US$ revenue / 566 employees = $221000 revenue / employee. Not bad for a software company.

According to my own personal regression analysis I did many years ago, a company is sustainable with at least $50000 revenue per employee. That's my personal ballpark number.