OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that the life of Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) will expand from five years to ten years.
"I am pleased to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years," said Shuttleworth.
Ubuntu 18.04 was released in April of 2018. Although everyone knows Ubuntu as a desktop, Canonical's earnings come from server and cloud clients. Canonical offered extensive security support to Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and now Ubuntu 18.04. In an interview after the conference, Shuttleworth said Ubuntu 16.04 will be backed up by April 2021.
As for OpenStack, Shuttleworth has promised to support OpenStack versions dating back to the 2014 IceHouse. Shuttleworth said: "What matters is not the second day, but the 1.500th day."
He also promised that Canonical would allow OpenStack customers to change from one version of OpenStack to another.
Shuttleworth also reported that in the last two years, Canonical had been acquiring Red Hat customers with Ubuntu. He explained that companies coming to Canonical are not coming to replace existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenShift facilities, but to expand into new technology areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML / AI).
However, Shuttleworth predicts that the redemption of Red Hat by IBM will lead its customers to switch to Ubuntu.
We are public cloud neutral, we work with AWS, Azure and Google, we provide shared services in different environments, but we are not the least common denominator. We want to be the best operating system for Azure, AWS, and so on.
He sees Red Hat as the only company that can compete with Canonical in the Linux and cloud business, and overlooks SUSE.
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Canonical has posted statistics for Ubuntu 1 8.04 LTS users
