Inside Canonical: the creators of Ubuntu have big plans for the future

Barry Collins Read more October 30, 2015

Think Canonical and you’ll think Ubuntu – the free operating system that perhaps doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Sure, it’s barely nibbled at the edges of Windows’ market share on the desktop, and it’s not even flavour of the month among the Linux community any more, but household names such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber have built their cloud businesses on Ubuntu.

Inside Canonical: the creators of Ubuntu have big plans for the future

As a result, public perception of the company tends to focus on the desktop OS. “Most people know Ubuntu. They don’t know Canonical; they don’t know it’s a British-headquartered company,” admitted Maarten Ectors, the company’s vice president of Internet of Things, Proximity Cloud and Next-Gen Networks. He also might be the current world record holder for longest job title, which underlines his point: there’s much more going on at Canonical than most people realise.

The big new project at the company is Snappy Ubuntu Core – a slimmed-down rendition of Ubuntu that’s not designed for servers or desktop computers, but washing machines, medical equipment, robotic arms, smoke detectors and the gazillion and one other devices that will comprise the Internet of Things. Canonical’s charismatic founder, Mark Shuttleworth, describes it as the “smallest, safest Ubuntu ever”, while Ectors claims it will allow developers to “put apps in anything”.

I asked him to reveal more about life beyond the desktop OS, and what it’s like to work in the company’s London headquarters.

Canonical’s bet on the Internet of Things

canonical_ubuntu_launchpad Founder Mark Shuttleworth leads an Ubuntu development meeting at Canonical

While Ubuntu’s cloud business has been a big success, Canonical cannot truthfully say the same for its phone OS. It failed to convince enough backers to crowdfund its own smartphone, and the OS has only appeared on a very limited selection of third-party handsets. However, even if Ubuntu phones never catch on, the development work hasn’t gone to waste. “The two sides of the house that have been contributing to Ubuntu [the desktop/server side, and the phone OS developers] have combined for a third product,” explained Ectors.

That third product is Snappy Ubuntu Core. The phone developers have brought their understanding of remotely upgrading operating systems, and running apps securely by sandboxing them from the main operating system. The cloud team bring their knowledge of packaging applications in “containers”– virtual structures that get only a share of the device’s resources, so they can’t drag down overall performance, and can be run on virtually any type of hardware.

“We can put apps on anything now,” said Ectors. “You can have a robot vacuum cleaner, you can have a fridge, you can have Wi-Fi routers, you could have a stereo, a car, a mobile base station, a tractor, an MRI scanner – anything can have apps, and an app store.”

“We can put apps on anything now… anything can have apps, and an app store.”

“Most people don’t realise what that means,” added Ectors, pointing to the disruptive nature of Uber’s app, which has seen taxi drivers across the world speak out in protest at their business model being ripped apart by amateur drivers with smartphones. “Imagine now that the capability of apps, which was only contained to one device, can now be transported everywhere. You can put apps on all sorts of devices.”

Canonical’s vision is that individual devices won’t only get smarter, but will gain the ability to integrate with other services. Ectors gave the example of a washing machine with a touchscreen display that could guide a hapless owner through the various wash cycles, using videos streamed over the internet. Devices will also interact seamlessly with one another: the keypad on that same washing machine could, for example, be used to set the burglar alarm.

“Somebody comes in, they just tap in the code for the alarm on their washing machine and then they don’t need to have an extra alarm keypad installed next to the door, which comes with the headache of having the batteries changed every year,” Ectors said. “Or, you could put a thermostat app on there and basically make the Nest from Google irrelevant.”

Canonical’s plan for that million-dollar app

Ectors predicts that app stores are about to become much more varied – and expensive. “You’ll have apps for your Wi-Fi router at home – £1 apps that come from your telecoms operator, for instance,” he said. “For firewall- type equipment, you could buy different kinds of firewalls and load balancers, which might cost hundreds or thousands for an app. And then you might have military equipment or telecom mobile base stations, and there you might have a million-dollar app, because it had to be tested for three years before you could put it in there.”

Canonical is, of course, not the only company with skin in this game. Microsoft has so far kept Ubuntu on the sidelines of desktop computing, while Apple and Android have shoved it to the margins of smartphones. All three have a considerable interest in emerging smart-home and Internet of Things technologies – so what gives Canonical the confidence that it’s going to find these markets any easier to crack?

“What we’re seeing now is the Internet of Isolated Things,” said Ectors. “Your Sonos only talks to the iPad app that came with it; your smartphone talks with one cloud service, and your Fitbit talks with another cloud service. What we’re offering is the possibility to connect your smartwatch to your fridge, and to also put apps on your fridge.”

Why would you want apps on your fridge? “Imagine that you want to lose weight. You could then put an app that says: ‘Okay, my fridge is locked when I get up in the morning until I stand on my scales.’ I’m obliged to stand on them, otherwise my fridge doesn’t open. Now comes the moment of truth: do I weigh more than my target weight or less? If I weigh more, the fridge will only open during mealtimes or when I do exercise and hit my next Fitbit goals.”

That kind of interoperability, enabling devices from any manufacturer to work together, simply won’t happen with Apple’s gatekeeper approach, according to Ectors. “The Internet of Things is interesting when you can connect everything, not just Apple products,” he said. Google, with its more open approach, remains Canonical’s “number-one competitor” – but Canonical already has the backing of companies such as Intel and ARM, and in Ectors’ words: “If you have more adoption, you make it.”

Canonical’s problem-solving philosophy

If some of Ectors’ ideas sound a tad far-fetched, that’s hardly surprising when you consider that the company’s founder paid for his own trip to the International Space Station, becoming the first South African ever to enter space. This is a company that encourages people to think big, even if the associated risks are high.

“The Internet of Things is interesting when you can connect everything, not just Apple products,”

“He is a very visionary person,” said Ectors of Shuttleworth, who stood down as CEO five years ago to take a more hands- off role. “He will see where the technology is today, understand the problems of the past, and then look at where technology will go tomorrow – and what tomorrow’s problems will be.”

“If I know that people in three years’ time will have a problem, I should start building a solution for that today,” he added. He said that Canonical is focused on these “disruptive innovations”, but that these come with a high risk of failure compared to evolutionary ideas. “There’s nobody you can ask and say ‘imagine if you have this problem, will this and this solve it?’ It’s a problem that’s still coming.”

This means that employees at Canonical have to be adaptable. Development teams work in squads, focusing on a specific task, but “it might be that there’s a change, and something becomes extremely hot and we need to move people from one site to another.

“We’ve never have anyone leave because they were bored,” Ectors added. “We’ve had people leaving because it was a little bit too much excitement for them. It’s not something everybody’s fit for.”

If Canonical’s approach to new frontiers has you intrigued, why not learn how to create a chart-topping app and make your own millions?