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 Channel Futures

Best Practices


Open-Source Maverick Matt Asay Leaves Canonical, Ubuntu

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • December 13, 2010
Canonical COO Matt Asay intends to leave the company to join a start-up. Big news, indeed, especially since Asay held the COO post for only about 10 months. Is this a sign of Canonical's maturity or of a messy situation within the Ubuntu provider? And what does his departure mean in broader terms to the open-source ecosystem, in which Asay is a key figure?  Read on for some thoughts.

Canonical COO Matt Asay intends to leave the company to join a start-up. Big news, indeed, especially since Asay held the COO post for only about 10 months. Is this a sign of Canonical’s maturity or of a messy situation within the Ubuntu provider? And what does his departure mean in broader terms to the open-source ecosystem, in which Asay is a key figure?  Read on for some thoughts.

As followers of the open-source channel will recall, Asay joined Canonical February 2010, filling an opening created when then-COO Jane Silber replaced Mark Shuttleworth as CEO (though Shuttleworth remains chairman and focused on Ubuntu).

Asay’s roots within the open-source community already ran quite deep before his move to Canonical — his previous employers include the Caldera offshoot Lineo, Novell and Alfresco, a company specializing in open-source CMS software. In addition, Asay maintains a prominent voice within the community through his blog The Open Road, and is founder of the Open Source Business Conference.

Asay will be taking his experience to Strobe, an open-source startup focused on touch-based Web applications. The new company lured him, he said, because it’s “a very early stage company. … I realized that much of what they needed was what I had enjoyed so much at Alfresco: early spadework with customers and partners, plus figuring out business models and evangelizing new ways to be open. It didn’t hurt that that company’s early focus is on the publishing industry, a market and challenge I love.”

What It Means

There are two ways to interpret this news. While Ubuntu’s critics might read Asay’s move as a sign of problems within Canonical, the change also can be taken as a demonstration of the company’s maturity.

Personally, I see no validity behind the former reasoning. I bring it up, however, because the sea of anti-Canonical hostility that has been foaming over the past year makes it likely that someone will present Asay’s departure as evidence that the company is falling apart, Ubuntu is a conspiratorial front for Microsoft, and so on. And such claims could sound particularly forceful in the present circumstances because Asay has long stood as a strong advocate of open-source code, yet Canonical has been criticized for keeping some of its own software proprietary and for failing to give back to the open-source community.

But it seems quite unlikely to me that Asay’s move has anything to do with how much of Canonical’s code is open-source or any internal controversies which might exist inside the company. On the contrary, I’m inclined to believe that the growth the company has experienced recently — Asay mentioned a 300 percent increase in sales each quarter over the last year — has simply rendered it too mature for Asay’s tastes.

Indeed, Canonical is no longer a fledgling startup led by an eccentric space tourist, as it was in 2004. Going into 2011, it has turned into a substantial organization with 400 employees around the world and with a CEO who has at least as much experience in the business world as she does with software development.

Where Canonical will go from here remains to be seen, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some doubts about the viability of the Unity and Wayland plans announced in recent months. All the same, Asay’s departure, perhaps with a little irony, underlines the maturity which the company has reached, and the gravity of its position within the open-source ecosystem.

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Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Best Practices Open Source

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2 comments

  1. Avatar Kevin Pereau December 13, 2010 @ 2:49 pm
    Reply

    Whatever the reason, good luck to Matt. I have always enjoyed reading his Open Road BLOG. I hope he keeps writing it.

  2. Avatar Jef Spaleta December 16, 2010 @ 1:43 am
    Reply

    300% growth in revenue in the last year…speaks volume about how Canonical’s business has been going up to this year.

    300% revenue growth in the last year and still has not seen a break-even quarter. Not a single break-even quarter. That is a problem. Two years ago the assumption was Canonical was close to break even…. 300% revenue growth later and they still aren’t there. Clearly the assumptions about Canonical edging very close to break even prior to this year were very wrong. 300% revenue growth in a year and not in the black for a quarter. They aren’t a start up but they are still burning cash like a start up.

    So looking forward..where exactly are they going to get the next set of revenue wins that will give them the revenue they need to see a break-even balance sheet for a quarter?

    Cloud? What exactly is their business model there? They’ve dropped the ball on their cloud image store front concept. Even Eucalyptus is now partnering with Red Hat to go after the _enterprise_ market dollars for clouds with RHEV-M. How exactly does Canonical squeeze money from gratis deployments of Ubuntu in the cloud? I’ve seen very little evidence of a coherent business model there. With RHEL-6 out now the competition for paying customers in the cloud space has increased. Canonical has not articulated a value proposition for paying them money for Ubuntu support in the cloud.

    Training? They dropped their certification classes entirely in the last 6 months. That’s not a good sign for the overall support strategy.

    OEM pre-installs? Android is stealing the tablet and device OEM market from them without even really trying. And ChromeOS is coming. What are the bright points for the next year in terms of new OEM wins?
    There are only so many OEMs. Dell continues to be in there corner..but none of the other big OEMs are and there’s no buzz about upcoming Ubuntu branded pre-installed ARM devices.

    Ubuntu-One? There zero public information about the size of the _paying_ customerbase

    Landscape? There is zero public information about the size of _paying_ customerbase.

    I’ll make you a friendly little $5 wager that come this time next year no Canonical exec will go on record with the revenue growth rate for 2011 compared to 2010. It’s gonna be a tough tough year.

    -jef

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