Supply Chain Case Study: Canonical and Ubuntu

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I love talking about supply chain management in an open source software context, especially as it applies to managing collaborative processes between upstream projects and their downstream products. In the article linked above, I called out a couple of examples of supply chain management: an enterprise OpenStack distribution and a container management product utilizing Kubernetes and Docker for upstream platforms.

What about anti-patterns or things to avoid? There are several we could call out. At the risk of picking on someone I like, I’ll choose Canonical simply because they’ve been in the headlines recently for changes they’ve made to their organization, cutting back on some efforts and laying off some people. As I look at Canonical from a product offering perspective, there’s a lot they got right, which others could benefit from. But they also made many mistakes, some of which could have been avoided. First, the good.

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