canonical

Canonical Ltd., commonly known simply as Canonical, is a British multinational software company that develops and supports the Ubuntu operating system and a range of open-source technologies. Founded in 2004 by Mark Shuttleworth, it is privately held and headquartered in London, with engineering and product teams around the world. Canonical coordinates the Ubuntu project, funding development, governance, and commercial offerings.

Ubuntu is its flagship Linux distribution, available in free community editions and paid enterprise editions under the Ubuntu Pro banner, delivering long-term support and security updates. The company also develops and maintains technologies such as the Snap packaging system and Snapcraft, Juju for cloud orchestration, MaaS for hardware provisioning, Landscape for systems management, and MicroK8s for a lightweight Kubernetes deployment.

Canonical provides commercial support, training, and advisory services to enterprises, along with certified hardware and cloud integrations with major providers. It maintains partnerships with cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to optimize Ubuntu deployments on public and private infrastructure and supports on-premises data centers through the MAAS ecosystem.

The company plays a major role in the open-source ecosystem by coordinating development of Ubuntu, contributing to upstream projects, and funding research. Ubuntu is widely used on servers, desktops, cloud instances, and embedded systems, and Canonical continues to expand into areas such as edge computing and container orchestration.

In addition to the corporate entity, the term canonical is used more broadly to mean standard or authoritative, and in mathematics and computer science to describe a canonical form or canonicalization process.