Canonical Ltd.

Canonical Ltd.

Type	Private company limited by shares^[1]
Genre	Software Development
Founded	2004–03–05
Founder	Mark Shuttleworth
Headquarters	Europe (Registered: Douglas, Isle of Man. Operational HQ: London, United Kingdom)
Key people	Mark Shuttleworth
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Launchpad, Bazaar, TheOpenCD
Revenue	$10m+
Employees	50+
Subsidiaries	Fieldwave Ltd. (UK)
Owner	Mark Shuttleworth
Website	www.canonical.com
Formerly "M R S Virtual Development Ltd".

Canonical Ltd. is a private company founded (and funded) by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth for the promotion of free software projects. Canonical is registered in the tax haven Isle of Man and employs staff around the world, along with their main offices in London and support office in Montreal.

[edit] Open Source software projects sponsored by Canonical

Ubuntu, a Debian-based Linux distribution with a GNOME desktop.
Kubuntu, the KDE desktop onto of the Ubuntu core system.
Edubuntu, the Ubuntu core improved specifically for educational or thin-client environments.
Bazaar, a decentralized revision control system.
TheOpenCD, a collection of high quality free and open-source software compiled for users of Microsoft Windows. The programs come with a easy-to-use graphical installer and run under Microsoft Windows and cover most tasks. Examples are the GIMP, OpenOffice.org and PDF creation software.

Software Freedom Day
Go Open Source, a South African campaign to create awareness of, educate about, and provide access to open-source software. It is important, once awareness of OSS has been created, that interested parties have the ability to gain access to the software and services, and that they have access to additional resources for support and training. It ran from May 2004 to May 2006.
GEEK Freedom League, The FREEDOM league is a South African project designed to bring together the best of the open source world and the massive country-wide community of people driven to introduce as many new people as possible to the use of open source software. Anyone with the passion and ability can sign-up and receive all the materials needed to convert as many people and computers as possible. People will be able to log their installs and track their progress. [1]

Launchpad (website) a centralised website containing several component web applications designed to make collaboration between Free Software projects easier:
- Rosetta, an online language translation tool to help localisation of software (cf. the Rosetta Stone).
- Malone (as in "Bugsy Malone"), a collaborative bug-tracker that allows linking to other bug-trackers.
- Soyuz, a tool for creating custom-distributions, such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

Note: Launchpad is a proprietary project.

Current employees:

Mark Shuttleworth, employee 0, founder and self-styled "SABDFL" of the Ubuntu project, former Debian maintainer of Apache and founder of Thawte Consulting (2003–).
Robert Collins, of Squid cache-fame. Employee no. 2 who has worked on GNU arch and Bazaar for Canonical (2003–).
Matt Zimmerman, formerly of the Debian security team. Now Canonical/Ubuntu Chief Technical Officer (2003–).
James Troup, Debian FTP Master, in charge of server infrastructure at Canonical (2003–).
Scott James Remnant, Debian and GNU maintainer of GNU Libtool and co-author of the Planet aggregator. At Canonical, he has developed Upstart and heads up the release-team (2003–).
Jono Bacon, of LugRadio fame. Canonical's new Ubuntu community leader. (2006–)
Ian Jackson, developer of dpkg and former Debian Project Leader (2005–).
Ben Collins, former Debian Project Leader and kernel developer. (2006–).
Michael Vogt, developer of Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) and the Synaptic Package Manager.
Jonathan Riddell, former developer of Umbrello, who heads up Kubuntu development. (2004–).
Jeff Bailey, former Debian toolchains and glibc maintainer. In charge of support operation in Montreal, Canada. (2005–).
Colin Watson, Debian-Installer developer. (2003–).
Adam Conrad, kernel developer.
Jordan Mallach, Rosetta team member.
Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, Ubuntu-server lead.
Kees Cook, Ubuntu security team.
Oliver Grawert, Edubuntu lead (2004–).

Past employees:

Jeff Waugh, employee no. 3 of GNOME and Planet-fame, Business Development (2003–2006).
Daniel Silverstone, now Simtech (2003–2006).
Benjamin Mako Hill, former board member of SPI, now at MIT working on the OLPC. Community Liaison (2003–2005).
Daniel Stone, X.org developer now at Nokia (2003–2005).
Dafydd Harries, localisation and Rosetta (2003–2005).
Thom May, former Debian Apache maintainer (2003–2005).
Lamont Jones, now back at Hewlett-Packard (2003–2004).
David Miller ("no not David S. Miller") of Bugzilla fame and for a short-period employee no. 1 (2003–2003).