Ubuntu for Smartphones

Canonical has just signed its first deal to supply a smartphone with its mobile operating system, Canonical founder and product strategy leader Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview here at the LeWeb conference. He wouldn't say which company has agreed to use the Linux-based OS, but said it will be offered on high-end phones in 2014.

"We have concluded our first set of agreements to ship Ubuntu on mobile phones," Shuttleworth said. "We've shifted gears from 'making a concept' to 'it's going to ship.' That has a big impact on the team."

And, he said, Canonical is in board-level discussions with several others: "We are now pretty much at the board level on four household brands. They sell a lot of phones all over the world, in emerging and fully emerged markets, to businesses and consumers."

It's significant progress for a nine-year-old company that has specialized in the Ubuntu version of Linux. But it's a very long way to making even a small dent in the dominance of Google's Android and Apple's iOS.