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 desktop with, Canonical's profits come from server and cloud customers. For enterprises Canonical offered extended security support in Ubuntu 12.04, then Ubuntu 14.04, and now Ubuntu 18.04. In an interview after the conference, Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu 16.04 will be supported until 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 mentioned that for the past two years, Canonical had been taking Red Hat customers with Ubuntu. He explained that the companies coming to Canonical are not coming to replace existing Red Hat installations Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenShift, but expand into new areas technology, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), the engineering 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