Businesses Choosing "Community" Linux Distros 149
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. "
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.
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.
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: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.
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: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.
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.
Sensible in many situations (Score:1, Interesting)
If you're running a large compute cluster or server farm, it only makes sense to use one of the community distributions. Even with volume discounts, licensing and purchasing support for an enterprise release such as RHEL or SLES is prohibitively expensive. This is one reason why the Rocks clustering distro is well-accepted, as it's based on CentOS and uses unencumbered packages for just about everything.
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.
Re:A Question of Investment (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely -- the fundamentals of open-source have a "prisoners' dilemma" in them. Everyone would be better off if everybody contributed to development, but each individual is better off free-loading off everyone else. X development has already, reportedly, stalled somewhat, despite having a bucketload of users. The financials, of course, are leading a lot of the industry in the opposite direction. For example, Google's core algorithms (and any other proprietary Web service) far from being open-source have a "you don't even get to see the object code" policy. But so many Slashdotters still consider Gmail part of an "open source" Linux desktop -- the devil's greatest achievement was to make you think he doesn't exist? (badly misquoting The Usual Suspects)
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.
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.