Canonical Ltd. is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects. Canonical employs staff in more than 30 countries and maintains offices in London, Austin, Boston, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo and the Isle of Man. Projects Canonical Ltd. has created and continues to back several projects. Principally these are free and open-source software (FOSS) or tools designed to improve collaboration between free software developers and contributors. Some projects require a Contributor License Agreement to be signed. Open-source software Ubuntu Linux, a Debian-based Linux distribution with GNOME (formerly with Unity) desktop Ubuntu Core, tiny, transactional version of Ubuntu GNU Bazaar, a decentralized revision control system Storm, an object-relational mapper for Python, part of the Launchpad code base Juju, a service orchestration management tool MAAS, a bare-metal server provisioning tool cloud-init, the de-facto standard for the initial setup of virtual machines in the cloud Upstart, an event-based replacement for the init daemon Quickly, a framework for creating software programs for Linux Ubiquity, installer Mir display server MicroK8s since December 2018 Snappy package manager Snapcraft, python-based tool for packaging software Launchpad a centralised website containing several component web applications designed to make collaboration between free software projects easier: PPA, a special software repository for uploading software packages to be built and published as an APT repository, Blueprints, a tool for planning features of software, Code, hosting of Bazaar branches, Answers, support tracker, Rosetta, an online language translation tool to help localisation of software (cf. the Rosetta Stone), Malone (as in "Bugsy Malone"), a collaborative bug-tracker that allows linking to other bug-trackers, Soyuz, a tool for creating custom-distributions, such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu. Other projects and services Landscape, a proprietary web service for centralized management of Ubuntu Linux systems Ubuntu One, a discontinued service since 2014 for file synchronization and other uses Ubuntu Advantage, a commercial support service that covers Ubuntu and other Canonical products Multipass, launched in 2019, provides a command line interface to launch, manage Virtual Machine instances of Linux in Windows, macOS and Linux. Joint ventures Windows Subsystem for Linux, with Microsoft Business plans In 2007, Canonical launched an International online shop selling support services and Ubuntu-branded goods; later in 2008 it expanded that with a United States-specific shop designed to reduce shipment times. At the same time, the word Ubuntu