As commercial vendors move into the enterprise arena (Red Hat and SUSE come to mind), they have struggled to keep in touch with their vibrant developer communities. (Though the openSUSE Project seems to be faring better than the Fedora Project in terms of community strength.)

We posed this scenario to Shuttleworth, who was resistant to a similar fate befalling Canonical. He cited the main difference between Canonical and the other commercial vendors’ approaches as being in the core revenue model. Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, and the like depend on licensing and support fees for revenue. Canonical, on the other hand, will depend solely on support for revenue. Which, Shuttleworth explained, means Canonical will continue to rely on the community as a development and design resource. Therefore, he added, Canonical will strive to keep that relationship very strong.