The saga of Ubuntu-maker Canonical‘s IPO endeavours now stretches back pretty a couple decades. I consider the to start with time I talked to the company’s founder Mark Shuttleworth about going community was in 2018, however there experienced previously been some chatter about it in former a long time. But the timing by no means pretty labored out for Canonical. In a push briefing in advance of today’s launch of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Shuttleworth pointed out he now expects it to go general public future 12 months.

“We are on keep track of to float the business. And now I’m fairly confident that we will do that in 2023,” explained Shuttleworth, who was calling in from an undisclosed island off the coastline of West Africa. “And so we’re using lively ways at the board stage and in our finance procedure — many other elements of the company — to be ready for that. We’re now efficiently on a really distinct plan to a flotation of the company up coming yr.”

He pressured that Canonical is not in a situation where by it has to raise outside funds and that going community for him is not about fundraising. He observed that Canonical’s revenue past year was $175 million and that the company’s major challenge suitable now is that need is larger that the company’s capability to assistance it, in huge part because there is not plenty of expertise on the sector for the business to employ.

“My biggest issue as we move through all of that — as we improve equally the selection of colleagues and change to getting a general public firm with that type of accountability — is to obtain the harmony among preserving what I believe people today definitely appreciate about Ubuntu and Canonical and also continuing to action up to the duties that I think we now have in the worldwide tech marketplace. […] We’re quite fully commited to the plan that as we develop, we’re not going to do that in a way which is shallow or triggers complications for us more down the line — we are really conservative in how we improve.”

Shuttleworth built these comments for the duration of a briefing ahead of the launch of the most current lengthy-time period assist launch of Ubuntu. This new version, 22.04 LTS, involves a selection of new options, such as support for confidential computing on Microsoft Azure, optimized photos for AWS’s Arm-primarily based Graviton devices, desktop aid for Raspberry Pi 4 and a lot more.