Ubuntu – What’s the history of Ubuntu

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.

Firstly a lot of people work on Ubuntu in their free time (many of them programming, but also those of here for instance answering people's questions). Also some people donate to Ubuntu.

However there is more to the story. Canonical Ltd. is a private company that created and continues to pay for Ubuntu. We know Canonical hadn't been making a profit, but Canonical was initially founded by multi-millionaire Mark Shuttleworth which meant it didn't have to focus on making money right away.

However Canonical is now looking towards to making Ubuntu profitable. (After all, they have 600+ employees to pay every month!) There are some indications this has been successful. Their key revenue streams offer services around Ubuntu:

• Support services (mostly to business) alongside which they sell Landscape
• Contracting services to businesses (for instance working with OEMs such as Dell, or helping Google with Chrome OS). As Ubuntu makes its way onto mobile phones and TVs then this will grow.
• Ubuntu Software Centre's paid section (Canonical takes a cut of purchases)
• The Canonical Store (selling physical Ubuntu branded items) - discontinued
• Closed-source projects wishing to use Launchpad.net can purchase a license
• Ubuntu One (online file storage and synchronization service) and Music Store (selling music from within Ubuntu) - discontinued.
• Amazon referrals. When you search the Ubuntu Dash, you may see Amazon products (unless you have turned it off). Ubuntu takes a cut of these.^[ref]

All of these are areas that Canonical hopes will grow.