Ubuntu – Why doesn’t Ubuntu move to DVDs?

In short: Canonical funds it.

Where they get the money from is perhaps a better question. Well they sell services and support and they also have a fairly wealthy founder in the shape of Mark Shuttleworth.

Edit: As others have said, the latest report we have on finances is from 2008 when the company wasn't near breaking even but as I've just detailed in a comment, for things you believe in, breaking even isn't everything... Especially when you can afford for it to make a loss.

Of course the aim is for the project to become self-sufficient but at the moment the only return on investment comes through the channels I've already talked about. OEM services, B2B support, consumer level paid support. You have to respect that once Ubuntu hits critical mass gets real demand, the demand for professional services and complimentary products also increases.

If you want detailed financial information, I suggest you call Canonical. They'll either give you the numbers or tell you to stop being so nosey... But they're the only people that can tell you for certain.

Edit 2 (Re: "can't have it both ways"): - Utter nonsense! Of course you be benevolent and keep a vested interest in something. His belief and benevolence toward Ubuntu is there to help it fix Bug #1 which helps his commercial interests in Canonical.

There's no contract in kindness that stops you making money from it immediately or down the line.

There are several issues with this level of tracking:

1. As others have said in this thread, most people use the most geographically "relevant" mirror possible as it speeds things up for them. These mirrors are mostly not under the control of Canonical.

   Even if Canonical could grab the remote logs, there'd be international privacy laws to obey which would end up with users perhaps having to agree to multiple agreements depending on the jurisdiction of a chosen server.

2. Some people don't use public mirrors at all. If you're using Ubuntu in a farm or corporate scenario over dozens or hundreds of machines (anything over three machines would make sense IMO), people proxy the repositories so only the first hit would count.

3. Some people could just beat on the refresh link all day. Not only would that skquiff the statistics but it would also gum the servers up more than they needed to be.

4. Sometimes it's better not to know.

   It sounds stupid but one of my jobs is maintaining a webapp for a company that several large businesses use to train their employees. I've talked about adding extra data collection so we have a better idea what a user is doing as that would be handy for improvement but if we collect that data (and advertise that fact, as we're required to by UK law), our clients will expect to know the results of our collection.

   That's fine if the data shows strong growth (or lots of their employees using the webapp in my case) but if it doesn't, it can really undermine marketing efforts. Not all data can be spun into something positive.

   Because the data would not be a full representation of all users, any statistics drawn would be lower than actual values and Microsoft (et al) could very quickly bomb them with a few sales stats.

There is a package for OEM installs called canonical-census but as I've already detailed this only works for OEM installs. Read the link to see how it works but I will say it's slightly better than repo-logging.

I guess one question to ask you back would be: Why do Canonical need these numbers? Even if they were great results, the problem still exists that there just isn't that much money to market Ubuntu. And if they weren't as stellar as needed for certain advertising claims (or weren't released for that reason), the collection would certainly undermine the project.