Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market

'We should be a public company,' Shuttleworth tells The Reg, just not 'with our trousers around our ankles'

Interview An initial public offering is a matter of when, not if, for Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, though interested stock owners shouldn't expect a prospectus anytime soon.

"We are well north now of the financial minimums needed for an IPO," he tells The Register during the Ubuntu 25.10 Summit at Canonical's headquarters.

However, the open source veteran emphasizes the real barrier is operational readiness rather than revenue, product, or technical milestones. "I am very calmly of the view that we should be a public company, but also very calmly of the view that there's no need to do it when we're not mature enough."

Shuttleworth is against going public "with our trousers around our ankles," citing market volatility and the need for company confidence before subjecting the business to public scrutiny. He's not wrong.

Canonical has maintained steady profitability and growth during the multiple years since its long-rumored but never materialized IPO plans.

Unlike many company founders, whose goal from day one is to gather up multiple rounds of VC funding and then cash out as a unicorn as fast as humanly possible, Shuttleworth invested his own capital in Canonical.

Armed with around $575 million after selling Thawte to VeriSign in 1999 – and after paying $20 million for a space flight before SpaceX and Blue Origin made civilian space travel almost commonplace for the multimillionaire set – Shuttleworth's substantial backing has allowed Canonical to operate without the usual multiple VC-led rounds. He's kept doing this because he remains passionate about both Linux and open source software.

Despite Ubuntu's reputation as a leading Linux distribution, Shuttleworth describes Canonical's ambitions as far more expansive. It continues to invest heavily in R&D, growing a global team to nearly 1,400 employees, 900 of whom work in technical roles, with the remainder in support and commercial operations. Headcount has more than doubled since layoffs in 2017, and Canonical's presence spans 80 countries and every time zone, enabling "follow the Sun" support and operations.

If those numbers seem high on the technical side, that's because they are. As Shuttleworth tell us, "a typical organization would be about a third R&D. We're two-thirds R&D. We're still very much investing in broadening the base of open source that we can support, growing the number of packages that we support, and growing the number of different places we can deliver goodness."

This, Shuttleworth observes, is all in support of Canonical's strategy to meet open source needs across disparate environments rather than focusing narrowly on single use cases. All of this is to underpin his vision of Canonical as an open source company that offers a broad range of open source-based services, ranging from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the desktop to the cloud, though not mobile.

"The larger an organization is, the more diverse its needs are. Rather than be a single solution provider, I would rather anchor in our diversity, where what we can do best is to enable people to trust us with open source they can use in a wide range of circumstances."

Thinking of the global market, does the rise of interest in digital sovereignty, especially in the European Union (EU), present an opportunity? Shuttleworth warns of "balkanization" and supply chain weaponization. In particular, he references the US government restrictions on Chinese access to GPUs.

He positions open source, somewhat idealistically, as a universal remedy, arguing that Canonical strives to play by a "strictly level playing field on a global basis," enabling open source to transcend political boundaries.

"I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm never going to be red, white, and blue enough for specific projects in the US, or red enough for some projects in China, or blue enough perhaps for certain projects in Europe, but that's OK with me. I want to represent what open source can do on a universal basis."

Asked about the perennial question of Linux's desktop prospects, Shuttleworth asserts his belief in open source's potential, but cautions the community to focus on "the 'just works' phenomenon" for non-engineers. Still, "I'm a believer in the potential of Linux to deliver a desktop that could have wider and universal appeal."

He praises innovators like US Linux computer company System76, which is pursuing desktop environments for broader audiences with its new Rust-based COSMIC desktop. Indeed, System76 presented a session on COSMIC at the Ubuntu Summit.

Part of the problem the Linux desktop faces, he thinks, is the open source community needs to understand that building desktops for people who aren't engineers is different. "We need to understand that the 'just works' phenomenon is really important. So, I really salute folks like the System76 folks because I think they're really focused on building something that can work for a wide and broad-based audience."

"Sometimes, I think the Linux desktop environments users are too happy with an 'it's for us, by us,' attitude. If we want to pursue a more global opportunity, we're going to have to build something that isn't just for us, but for a wider audience, the way Chrome OS and macOS have."

Don't think that Shuttleworth and the team are considering switching out default desktops, though. According to Jon Seager, VP of Ubuntu Engineering, the plan is to continue supporting the latest version of GNOME in the next long-term support release of Ubuntu 26.04. This should be GNOME 48 running on Wayland.

Shuttleworth, while hoping desktop Linux gains more global mainstream adoption, realizes desktop Linux fragmentation remains an issue. "If we want Linux to be a true global alternative, we need to do something that has a lot of heft behind it, and we need to not tear each other down."

He laments the negativity that greeted Canonical's Unity desktop experiment but credits the pivot to server, cloud, and IoT as fueling Canonical's current profitability.

There is growing enterprise and government interest in Linux desktops due to dissatisfaction with Windows 11, anger over the end of free Windows 10 support, and disgruntled personal and business users over Microsoft's enforced obsolescence of perfectly good PCs. All of this gives the Linux desktop its best chance ever to gain significant market share.

Shuttleworth is affirming Canonical's commitment to broad-based open source enablement, inclusive of cloud, desktop, and device innovation. He acknowledges ongoing tensions between startup agility and the "grown-up" discipline required for an IPO, but maintains that Canonical's trajectory remains deliberate and globally ambitious.

"I would like to be part of open source winning the desktop... Maybe this is the moment," he concludes. ®