Canonical Ltd continues to back and has created several projects. Principally these are Free Software/Open Source software or tools designed to improve collaboration between Free Software developers and contributors.
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.[10]
Freedom Toaster, kiosk-style machines located in South Africa designed to avoid costly and prohibitive download costs. Users provide their own blank CD media and after insertion they can choose a GNU/Linux distribution of their choice to take home.
Proprietary projects
Landscape[11], a tool for managing large numbers of Ubuntu-based systems via a web-browser.
Launchpad[12] 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.
Canonical originally started as a wholly virtual organisation with employees working from home. The company now maintains a facility on the 27th floor of the Millbank Tower near Westminster.[13] In the summer of 2006 Canonical opened an office in Montreal, Quebec to house their global support and services operation.[14]
References
^ UK registered trademark #E4059218 "CANONICAL", filed 2004–09–29.
^ The Isle of Man Companies Registry, Annual Return 2005 for Company no. 110334C (non-distributable, available for a fee of £1.00)
^ Kirk, Jeremy. "Canonical chases deals to ship Ubuntu Server preinstalled", IDG News Service, 2007-10-09. Retrieved on 2007-12-12. "But enlargement of its enterprise support business could bring more contracts to Canonical, which is not yet profitable but does not release revenue figures."
