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Businesses Choosing "Community" Linux Distros
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 01, 2008 07:03 AM
from the dropping-the-training-wheels dept.
from the dropping-the-training-wheels dept.
An anonymous reader sends along a PCWorld recap of a new study by the 451 Group, which claims that business use of 'community' Linux distributions is on the rise — distros like Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian, as opposed to "corporate" packages like RHEL and Suse. The trend is most evident in Europe. The article points out examples in Sweden and Germany, and cites growing in-house expertise with Linux as one factor helping enterprises get comfortable choosing Linux distros without commercial support. Interestingly, the Swedish company mentioned, Blocket.se, has made a one-off support arrangement with their hardware vendor HP: "HP is really providing device driver and utility support it uses for customers running RHEL, but because the two distributions are binary-compatible, that support approach works just fine for CentOS. Blocket relies on its own engineers, systems administration, and software development to get its applications running on Linux. "
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I saw that on a supermarket chain (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain (Score:5, Insightful)
In Brazil, some times companies use Debian as their main SO, and hire their own support.
I must confess I have no idea how much "enterprise" distro charge for support, but I think that if companies are starting to use their own support, it must not be cheap. Maybe this should send a message to RH and company
Parent
Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem isn't just the cost, but what they will support. I have found in the past that reading and asking questions on forums is more helpful than waiting on the phone for a RHEL support person to tell me that the configuration I seek support for isn't supported. A lot of businesses are comfortable spending money for a support contract, but when they find the support lacking, they have to decide for themselves if it is worthwhile.
I worry about reports like these because while I'm a CentOS user, I realized that I am somewhat riding on the coat tails of RedHat's development efforts...actually, now it is RedHat/Fedora-Community development but still. What if this trend were to continue resulting in the end of RedHat? I would really rather not switch distros. I more or less started with RedHat (even though my first install was Slack) and I have learned a lot from it. I have existed within a RedHat/Fedora/CentOS environment all this time. Switching could be a pain.
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As someone who's juggling OpenSUSE, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Windows, and a few other boutique OSes, I can tell you for a fact that's not something you should worry about unless you hand tweak configuration files and have your /etc tree memorized. Anything short of that and migrating between distros will take you a month or two tops (assuming you're actively investing time learning the layout of the various administrative tools/menus.)
Quite frankly the configuration tools on redhat have changed quite a bit j
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If you think RedHat is great at what it does, put your money where your mouth is. It is not that there is a lack of distributions.
Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain (Score:5, Interesting)
Admitted noob question:
What benefits does a Linux like CentOS offer over something like OpenBSD? I used to be a strong Linux supported, but recently have started using OpenBSD everywhere I can. Ports is good, as good as any other package manager I have ever seen, the install is VERY simple, package availability is there...
Is there something that I'm missing that makes the Linuxes so much better than the BSDs? They definitely seem to be more popular.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As another OpenBSD fan, there are still things Linux does better IMO.
Linux still performs better - especially on todays multicore systems.
As secure as the core of OpenBSD is, it is only the core systems security that is looked after by the OpenBSD team. Unless things have changed recently (corrections welcome), security updates for 3rd party apps you've installed are your responsibility with OpenBSD.
Rebuilding for security patches is tedious compared to letting the package manager just download binary updat
Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain (Score:4, Informative)
I must confess I have no idea how much "enterprise" distro charge for support, but I think that if companies are starting to use their own support, it must not be cheap. Maybe this should send a message to RH and company
Depends on the context. If - as we do - you only use RHEL because you need a certified platform for some other obscenely expensive piece of software (eg: Oracle), then the cost of RH's licensing is basically irrelevant.
Parent
Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain (Score:4, Informative)
In Brazil, some times companies use Debian as their main SO, and hire their own support.
I must confess I have no idea how much "enterprise" distro charge for support, but I think that if companies are starting to use their own support, it must not be cheap. Maybe this should send a message to RH and company
Parent
Ubuntu is corporate (Score:5, Insightful)
How is Ubuntu not a corporate distribution? There is a
corporation developing and releasing that
product, even if it is loosely based on Debian.
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Eh? They're referring to the target user base, not whether the distro in question is developed by a corporation or not.
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Community is a misnomer, more like "free as in beer" distros. I think calling CentOS a "community distro" is a stretch too, isn't a recompilation of RHEL that explicitly make no functionality or patches themselves anything like a community? I think it's the Ret Hat Linux story all over again, it was very popular because it was gratis and Red Hat killed it in favor of products they could make money on (no, Fedora is not a replacement for what RHL was). We'll see what happens this time around.
Ubuntu is "cummunity developed and supported" (Score:2)
The point is that businesses don't buy an "enterprise" version of Ubuntu for $800/yr to get support. The Canonical company sells professional support services and training a la carte.
Re:Ubuntu is corporate (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, ubuntu server is indeed every bit as solid as RHEL or SLES, and enterprise support contracts are available from canonical. We're a SLES shop, but we've set up some ubuntu servers and are impressed with the distro. We'd love to roll out ubuntu on a large scale but the chief stumbling block is not any fault of ubuntu, but our old nemesis, the old boy network again.
Oracle is the chief obstacle here, as they are pushing their own redhat clone (or redhat proper), barely tolerate suse, and dismiss everything else. They quite arrogantly (you had to be there) remarked that they had "no plans" to offer oracle for ubuntu. While annoyed at their arrogance, I do trust that time and market conditions will have them singing a different tune. I remember oracle telling me in 1998 that they don't support linux, and that I should try sco. muahaha.
Even so, we're looking at using ubuntu for general infrastructure roles - smtp, ftp, ntp, dns, etc. On the oracle front, our national manager is just angry enough to look very hard at using postgres or db2 or anything but oracle.
Parent
How it's supposed to work. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how things are supposed to work with linux, isn't it? You support your local economy by using local people, instead of sending money away to whereever the HQ happens to be.
I thought this was one of the strengths with linux. Let's see if RH or SUSE has a business model that works according to this reality.
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I agree completely. What RH and SUSE and Canonical, etc, etc now need to do is convince companies that they can do the customization job cheaper than the company's in house staff. Every installation needs planning, modification and execution. Why not choose experts who do it every day?
The problem the big distros face is that they have been used to providing crappy proprietary style hand-holding support rather than giving a true service. If you read what Michael Teimann has written about his experience,
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Re:How it's supposed to work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure about RedHat, but Novell (with openSUSE) activaly sponsors openSUSE and has made it extremely easy to make an openSUSE basded distro [opensuse.org]
Almost all other tools are included as well, including the Build service [opensuse.org] which can be downloaded and is used to make the distributions from scratch.
So I would say they are at least very much aware of the reality. Also do not forget that these companies invest people and time in thinks like the kernel, KDE, GNOME and other OSS and Linux related projects.
It will not be the downfall of Linux if those companies go away, but it will leave a serious impact when the developers who are paid to work on Linux won't be doing that anymore.
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If they're just using open source stuff in house, they're not distributing any changes, so they don't have to give anyone the source.
In my experience, this is likely wrong, at least for bug fixes. Enterprises don't want to maintain separate trees for applications not part of their core business just for fixing a bug, so sending the bug fix to the developers is the sane thing to do, and at least this is what my employers have done.
Linux at the bottom, Mac OSX at the top (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm seeing across Europe is a growing use of not ABW (Anything but Windows) but WIW (What I Want). So developers are using Linux, and supporting it themselves, and execs are using Macs. A very common pattern is to see the "standard" corporate image run inside a virtual machine which gives access to the corporate email and other MS apps while the user spends lots of their time in the native machine doing their work. As a way to do "home working" this also works well as it means the corporate contamination of your home machine is limited to just the virtual image.
With more and more things being browser surfaced the need to have an MS box is reducing and people are choosing to use what they want and support it themselves. The corporate desktop therefore becomes virtual.
Personally I've a Linux laptop for Dev and a Mac OSX for the rest of my work, the Mac runs a windows VM for my corporate access.
This isn't a big religious thing its just that it works.
Re:Linux at the bottom, Mac OSX at the top (Score:5, Interesting)
So developers are using Linux, and supporting it themselves, and execs are using Macs.
I brought Ubuntu with me on day one on the new job. It's getting a warm reception. I tried suggesting Macs for the other execs and sales staff but they didn't want them. Some of the sales people want to stay with their Windows laptops, which is fine, we expected to support those anyway. The other execs surprised me by opting to move to Linux instead, even our CEO. I thought they'd be more amped about getting Macbooks, but no one really wanted one. That was a surprise.
For some of the older IBM laptops we're experimenting with PuppyLinux. Seeing if we can get some more mileage out of them. But Ubuntu is getting a warm reception. Even caught one of the staff borging the Windows box in the flex work area with a live CD. Hiring hasn't been any problem. I've managed to find some blue chip Linux/PHP developers for about the same as we were paying the Windows only staff. Maybe the current job market played into the ease of that transition, but we had some really good candidates to pick from.
Moving off Exchange was a little more choppy but we got it done. There was one Gmail gotcha that delayed our roll out for a week but we got past that. Another surprise was after people uploaded their old messages to Gmail was how fast they dumped Outlook. We had planned on supporting Outlook but most everyone switched over to the Gmail interface on their own, a few had already been using Gmail anyway.
Linux is completely capable as a desktop OS in the working world. We have saved quite a lot of money just in licensing fees. Not only could we find skilled Linux people, we found them at competitive local market rates. Where we had three Windows developers, today we have one OSS developer and we're still meeting our development targets. Now we're moving on replacing services running on the remaining Windows servers so we can retire them. The savings are significant. It's a big win for me, although at this point it's picking off the low hanging fruit. Still, it's some good fruit. We're standing up servers for the cost of the hardware. Rolling out some pretty sophisticated services for the cost of the developer. Our next area of consolidation will be cutting loose some of the outsource providers and moving some of those services back in house. You can do things like that when you're not blowing your budget on Microsoft licensing.
Parent
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I'm not surprised that "community distros" are becoming more popular in the business setting. I've always been skeptical of Linux's ability to steal market share from Windows, but I've just recently installed Ubuntu 8.0.4 on a home computer and work computer. I'm astonished. It's stable, installation was easy (easier than Windows XP or Vista), package management was easy, and device drivers were plentiful (device detection was perfect). At work, the OpenOffice Suite, Netbeans, Java, and Eclipse were adequa
Re:Lighter weight distros (Score:5, Interesting)
Once the top staff notice that they using the computer for work rather than spending all their time fighting Windows, you can probably zap that last box, too.
Most of the staff managed without any prompting from us. We were prepared for a lot of hand-holding that never materialized. Even with OpenOffice there hasn't been much. One question on how to do mail merge, I think.
The XP box in the flex area is supposed to be for guests and one of our vendors uses GoToMyPC for demonstrations and that doesn't work with Linux...that I know of anyway. And, yes, that's one of the vendors we're phasing out.
There is entertainment value in seeing the XP box sitting alone and unused in the flex area. Ultimately suffering the indignity of becoming the pedestal for the flex area scanner/copier and being periodically borged with a live CD. Poor sad little Windows box, nobody wants it. lol.
Puppy got the nod because it looks nice. I know that's not a great reason but if that smooths over the transition, fine. The laptops aren't that old. They have 256 meg of RAM and are pretty zippy running Puppy. The sales and execs probably use their Blackberries more than the laptops anyway. The only people with desktops are administrative, developers and support.
Parent
Re:Linux at the bottom, Mac OSX at the top (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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A very common pattern is to see the "standard" corporate image run inside a virtual machine which gives access to the corporate email and other MS apps while the user spends lots of their time in the native machine doing their work.
I don't think "common" is the word you're after here. I struggle to believe such an expensive and complex solution is necessary - let alone desirable - outside of a handful of corner cases.
Ubuntu Support Contracts (Score:5, Interesting)
Ubuntu support contracts are available, same as Redhat, which is the reason we use ubuntu as our standard server, not debian. The other reason being our in house engineers are more likely to have ubuntu experience than redhat, as it's free and ubiquitous.
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Really though, good point about support contracts being a reason to choose one distro over another. That's what the article misses: for a lot of IT shops, support contracts are very cost effective.
New Business Model? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the Red Hat business model? (A little arm chair CEOing here - clearly I'm not CEO material, but this is Slashdot.) Hopefully, it can continue to support a steady stream of businesses migrating away from Microsoft for some time. But what about when that runs out?
The self supported businesses will still need to obtain their in-house expertise somehow. So training and certification would be one profit center. Contract work like IBM does would likely become the core business. Having an inside track as the distro maintainers is a valuable selling point, so continuing RHEL is vital - but must now be subsidized by training and contract work.
Re:New Business Model? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
If the article quote is true... (Score:5, Insightful)
openSUSE? (Score:3, Insightful)
openSUSE is also a community [opensuse.org] distro [opensuse.org] where Novell is part of that community (as well as the sponsor).
Re: (Score:2)
But that's openSUSE. The summary/article means Novell's SLED version of Suse, which isn't a community distro.
RedHat and SuSE's strategy backfiring... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, SuSE's distribution was always aggravating to those who wanted it for free (no free ISO downloads back in the day meant it was hard to install for free). RH was amenable to first-party free distribution until RH9, after which they decided this was their way.
Namely, both SuSE and RHEL have a 'commercial-only' distribution with those enterprise sensibilities and a free 'first-party' offering that is ostensibly an enthusiast endeavor which really translates to recruiting enthusiasts as testers. They bank on trademark/copyright of text and images to keep clones from looking *too* much like their first-party offerings. CentOS is from a technical standpoint, a clone (plus some other stuff, but the clone-only behavior is default), but distinguishable enough to preclude Vendor and ISV support (both don't want to go the linux support path alone generally).
Meanwhile, here comes Canonical. They truly keep the distribution and support model independent. They have rapid release cycles, but denote a more 'enterprise-friendly' LTS cycle underscoring things. Regardless, the distribution is free to download and distribute. So clients can prototype and train and even do production as they feel comfortable with doing so without support, and then when they do need support, the contract is available without reinstall or other drastic measures. Suddenly, the mark of whether another party will support it or not is not keyed on the distribution, instead requiring a Canonical support contract to be in place.
I think SuSE/RH's approach is botching the market. I know of a *lot* of CentOS installs going in to places that might feel more comfortable with the option of purchasing a support contract. Knowing the strict distinction between RH and CentOS, Ubuntu will be very appealing to those places. The absolute identical nature of free training/development/prototyping systems with low support requirements and production use is also appealing.
Re:RedHat and SuSE's strategy backfiring... (Score:4, Informative)
SUSE has always been free for download. In the beginning it was free 2 months after the boxed version. This has changed when Novell took over. They also have put YaST under complete GPL as well.
Now there is a more clear difference between the community distribution and the corporate one. SUSE is corporate, openSUSE is community/
Both can be downloaded for free. For SUSE the (security-)updates need to be payed. For openSUSE they are free.
Oh and it hasn't been SuSE for a long while now.
Parent
Works for us (Score:5, Informative)
We use CentOS on pretty much all our 150-odd Linux servers, except for those that require RHEL to be in a supported configuration (Oracle DB, Oracle Appserver, Oracle Financials).
Of course, while we mainly do this to save money, out of the million-plus we pay Oracle, the few thousand in RHEL licenses doesn't even count as a rounding error (hell, compared to Oracle licensing, even the cost of the hardware is irrelevant).
Re: (Score:2)
Works for us too. Typically, we keep one current RHEL license in case we need support and every machine gets a CentOS install. The RHEL license is our "last resort" option if we cannot fix a problem ourselves or get support from the usual community resources.
With that said, we haven't had to use Redhat's support in several years. It's more of a baby blanket at this point. At one time it was something held closely to our hearts, but over time we just kinda forgot about it...but can't bring ourselves to f
A Question of Investment (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this present a problem in terms of one of the models of open source? One of the things often discussed on /. is the question of profiting from working in open source.
What's often been suggested is that there's money in support, and that if you create some software, and have experience then supporting it, that you gain a competitive advantage. That the likes of RedHat, MySQL etc will be customer's most likely first port of call.
If companies are simply going to go to someone else, that then suggests that investment in open source software could go down...
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"corporate" linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
We use SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) from Novell for many of our servers, and are very happy with how easy it is to maintain (a lease cycle for the hardware eliminates the need for upgrades). I would be extremely hard-pressed to even consider using a community edition for production servers - that corporate-level support is extremely important.
However, when it comes to the desktop, the community editions offer more modern features - Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), is several years behind the current Open Source SuSE.
If the linux desktop ever comes of age for the average user, SLED may offer a very stable, easy to use environment (at least for supported hardware). However, since Linux Desktop is still primarily a developer's game, the OSS version offers the bleeding edge developers like, and know how to cope with.
What's the headcount at these companies? (Score:4, Interesting)
I could see this happening for smaller companies, but for the larger companies, I can't see them switching over. Large companies *hate* change. And I'd imagine that it's the larger companies who are using the corporate editions, while the smaller ones feel comfortable with the community editions.
Most... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the businesses I've worked for I've pushed Debian as the distribution of choice. The biggest problem I see in mixed shops with Linux is often times there is no standardization on a single distribution. The one company I worked for had: Slackware, Gentoo, Redhat, SuSE, and some custom homebrew... I spent 3 months standardizing everything over to Debian. I built a standardized install manual, made sure we had a repository up to date with the latest drivers for special hardware, and setup all kinds of custom system status tracking with cacti and snmp. Management liked the new system setup so well that they eventually got rid of all the windows servers except two who ran custom software that our company's programmers wrote years ago and we lost the source code for.
Debian's free, the support is spectacular, it's package management is *excellent*, it's upgradable, it's easy to manage, and it doesn't install a lot of junk that is unneeded.
I *hate* rpm. It makes me crazy.
Works For Us ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You've never handled corporate software licencing, I take it? Pure pain it is. An administrative nightmare. Timed licences, demo licences, restrictive feature sets, yearly licences, two-yearly licences, monthly licences, per-workstation licences, per-user licences, simultaneous-connection licences, per-team licences, per-role licences, per-organisation licences, special discount licences, academic or industry partner licences which may or may not apply depending on which sub-organisation you consider yourse
Some distros may need goal redefinition (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux should be Linux, period. You should be able to use the entire Internet as your Linux repository. If package managers want to keep these so-called "third-party" packages separate from the ones they officially support for support contract reasons, so be it, but do not take away my freedom to install any piece of Linux software I want easily on any Linux distro. Cross-distro Linux packaging is more than possible [linuxfoundation.org] and should become a reality soon.
So, without these "exclusive" distro-specific software packages, what remains to define a "distro"? Well, of course it's what it was from the start, a simple bundle of software for the convenience of being able to find all the basics, or simply the software you want, in one place. Linux distros should never be anything more than software bundles.
Help with Linux defragmentation. Support more standard APIs for desktop [freedesktop.org] and general Linux interoperability to give everyone more choice and thus more freedom.
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Re:network isp services (Score:5, Insightful)
I call astroturf on the above...
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to choose a supported distro, even at a purely technical institution. For many organizations, it doesn't make sense to devote time or personnel to debugging system problems,
Looking at the cost of labor, when you're working with low end stuff, it's usually cheaper to replace the hardware with something that is supported than waste labor time. When working with high end stuff, someone's job is/was on the line when they specified the equipment, so presumably they got it right due to careful research. It's a good question if there is a middle ground anymore or if that has been overlapped and eliminated.
and it often costs more to have an IT department handle everything than to have someone from Red Hat or Novell solve the problem
Usually the more people you involve the longer it takes. Realize that it is extremely unlikely that RHEL or Novell has hired author of the software that is having a problem, and probably not likely they have anyone with more experience than your own guys in your field of endeavor. It is also highly unlikely that you are having a problem with the distribution mechanism itself (bug in dpkg or apt-get or whatever). So, what it boils down to, is it more efficient for someone familiar with your local system to use google to find the answer, or to have your guys spend extra time explaining the problem to someone else, who knows nothing about your system, so they can use google to find the answer?
Or did you think the most successful financial companies in the world made an unplanned decision
Considering that virtually all financial companies are either bankrupt or going bankrupt due to fraud and stupidity, looking at them as a role model seems about a decade out of date.
Virtually all decisions made to buy support contracts are either:
1) Out of touch "pre google era" PHB decision
2) No internal skillset for something that is business critical, terrible is better than nothing at all.
3) Cascading interlocking licenses and requirements (you "need" oracle, which requires RHEL, so you "need" a contract) That is a bad economic structure which will eventually be worked around or eliminated.
Parent
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I work in small office.
We can't fit an IT staff member, let alone an entire IT department. There's a fellow doing "IT" but he works with our office and a few others that we work closely with.
Although shit never hits the fan (but I'm waiting for it any moment because of bad decision making by PHBs) and I'm able to resolve a lot of minor problems (they're a windows shop so sadly my experience is just helpful in trying to find a solution by exploring) I do believe a paid support contract would be worth it.
But
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