Canonical returns Ubuntu to GNOME and dismisses 30% - 60% of developers

The other day, Mark Shuttleworth announced a sharp turn towards the development of Ubuntu. The management has decided to return to GNOME as the main shell of the desktop. Plus, the investment in the development of the Unity 8 shell, which was positioned as a version of Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets, stops. In addition, the company will no longer work on the convergence mode, which provides the ability to transfer mobile devices to desktop mode. Ubuntu version 18.04 LTS will be equipped with GNOME. Together with Unity 8 and convergence, the Mir display server also remains in the past.

The reason for the changes, according to Shuttleworth, is not at all a problem with Unity 8. The shell was excellent. The problem is that Canonical’s work is largely determined by market dynamics and community opinion. And just the community is not too favorably met the new products of the company. Unity 8, Ubuntu Touch and Convergence are generally regarded as fragmentation of Ubuntu. In general, Canonical's commercial partners were weakly interested in new products, preferring a bird in the hand to a crane in the sky.

Immediately after Shuttleworth made his statement, several communities emerged that plan to continue working on Unity 8 and Ubuntu Touch. The most notable of these are unity8.org , the UBports project, and others.
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And these are not all ads from Canonical. Some time after the Shuttleworth message, it became known about the upcoming mass dismissal of Canonical employees. They can reduce from 30% to 60% of the staff, it all depends on whether the company can find additional investments. Current investors considered Unity 8 not the direction that could be profitable. Their opinion is based on the fact that after 7 years of work on Unity, the company has not managed to achieve any significant success with this product.

The first to be cut will be those developers who were involved in the Unity 8 project - they simply have nothing to work with. Some valuable employees will have the opportunity to move to other projects. In particular, Canonical is going to strengthen such directions as cloud technologies and the Internet of things. Accordingly, the company will increase the number of employees engaged in projects with the appropriate focus.

Investors insisted on the decision on reductions, who considered that Canonical had more employees than they needed. Up to a certain point, Shuttleworth himself invested in projects of the company related to the development of Unity 8. But now he has decided to completely switch to financing using external investments. Canonical will become more like a commercial company than before.



“Our choice is aimed at investing in areas that allow the company to grow. This is Ubuntu itself, both for desktops and servers and virtual machines, also our cloud infrastructure products (OpenStack and Kuberbetes), plus additional cloud products (MAAS, LXD, Juju, BootStack), IoT and Ubuntu Core. All of them have communities, users, profits and growth that make up an excellent independent company with the possibility of growth, ”Shuttleworth said .