Is Canonical serious about pushing Ubuntu into businesses? The company’s latest corporate move provides a clear answer. Indeed, Canonical has hired Matt Asay — one of the open source industry’s best-known names — as its new chief operating officer. The move comes amid a CEO shift and several major product initiatives at Canonical. Here are some perspectives.

Canonical continues to press forward with an Ubuntu support strategy that blends channel partners with Canonical's own Ubuntu hand-holding in large enterprises. Here's a look at Canonical's efforts so far.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, sat for a video interview with Dell Cloud Computing Evangelist Barton George. In it, Shuttleworth takes a "service pack" shot at Windows 7 and covers numerous questions about Canonical's business and cloud strategy. Here's the video - plus some perspectives from WorksWithU.

I recently read with great interest Walt Mossberg’s review of the latest Ubuntu Linux, described as “relatively slick,” but still not ready for non-technical users. I have a couple of differing perspectives. The first is that Ubuntu is ultra slick. It’s free. It’s open source. It’s growing. It’s Linux and it works (usually).

Analysis of some of Canonical's recent moves, which give rise to Novell's Mono and proprietary software (at the expense of Free software)

Encouraging signs of ODF adoption in Europe, signs of possible intervention by Microsoft et al.

At first glance, Canonical is an operating system company - built around Ubuntu Linux. But take a closer look at Canonical's moves during the first half of 2009, and you'll find the company has increasingly bet its revenue stream on cloud, online and consulting/support services. Here's some perspective.

The latest version of Ubuntu just came out; Ubuntu 13.04 - Raring Ringtail. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has done a good job setting up a set of defaults for a fresh install, but there are a few things you may want to add or change on your freshly installed OS.
1. Privacy Settings

A batch of news and analysis that serves as an explanation -- however partial it may be -- of Microsoft's latest moves.