Canonical Ltd.

Canonical Ltd. is a private company founded on March 5, 2004 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Officially, the headquarters is located on the Isle of Man, but the staff of this organization and representative offices are scattered around the world. The main office is located in London, where the founder lives. The support office is located in Montreal (Canada), and the OEM team is located in Lexington (Massachusetts, USA). In Russia, Canonical is produced by Vladimir Kryukov (vladimir.kryukov@canonical.com), regional manager of the EMEA region .

Products - Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu

Performance indicators

2025: Revenue growth to $291 million

In June 2025, Canonical published a financial report, according to which revenue for 2024 amounted to $291 million. For comparison, $251 million was received in 2023, $205 million in 2022, and $84 million in 2013. The company's gross profit for 2024 amounted to $258.3 million (in 2023 - $218.5 million), operating profit - $15.5 million (in 2023 - $11.2 million). In 2024, $77.5 million was spent on sales organization and marketing; $36.7 million on development and research; $138 million on administrative costs.^[1]

History

2022: Termination of corporate customer support in Russia

On April 5, 2022, Canonical announced the restriction of its activities in Russia - support for corporate clients stops, but this will not affect individuals. With this decision, the developer of Linux distributions Ubuntu reacted to the Russian special operation in Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions.

According to Canonical, the company stops technical support for its corporate products and the provision of professional services, and also breaks off partnerships with Russian companies.

Ubuntu developer stopped support for corporate clients in Russia

We will not resume such contacts while extensive democratic sanctions against Russia are in effect, Canonical said in a statement.

The company promised not to restrict access to security fixes for Ubuntu users in Russia. It is claimed that free software platforms such as Ubuntu, VPN and Tor technologies will be available to all. The income that Canonical will receive from Russian paid subscribers for the remaining services will be used to provide humanitarian assistance to residents of Ukraine.^[2]

Canonical added that the company actively supports employees affected by the special operation and seeks to provide them with "maximum financial, emotional and physical security." In addition, Canonical provides assistance in accommodating victims and refugees.

2011: Choosing LibreOffice as the default office suite

At a meeting of the Ubuntu development team held in Dallas in the United States, the final decision was made to use LibreOffice as the office suite used in the default distribution. The question was whether this would happen in the upcoming release of Ubuntu 11.04 (codename Natty Narwhal), scheduled for April 2011. The first swallow was the appearance of LibreOffice in daily builds of the alpha version of Ubuntu. Now there is official confirmation. Neil Levine, vice president of Canonical, answering a question from ZDnet, confirmed that the developers of the Ubuntu team have decided to make LibreOffice the main office suite.

We can expect that the example of Ubuntu will be followed by Fedora - a distribution kit supported by Red Hat, the next release of which, Fedora 15, is expected on May 10. Fedora developers indicate that LibreOffice will be able to develop independently of Oracle if the latter decides to close the OpenOffice.org project, as previously happened with Open Solaris.

Novell also said that openSUSE will use LibreOffice. This is quite predictable, given that a large number of Novell and openSUSE programmers are directly involved in the development of LibreOffice. True, due to a certain delay due to the purchase of Novell by Attachmate, it can no longer be expected that this will happen in the next release of openSUSE on March 10.

Notes