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Paid Support Not Critical For Linux Adoption

Posted by Soulskill on from the why-buy-the-milk-when-you-can-get-the-cow-for-free dept.

ruphus13 writes "At the LinuxWorld expo, an analyst for the 451 Group pointed to a growing trend in enterprise — the increase in adoption of community-supported Linux distros. From the article, 'Companies are increasingly choosing free community-driven Linux distributions instead of commercial offerings with conventional support options. Several factors are driving this trend, particularly dissatisfaction with the cost of support services from the major distributors. Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell.'"

2 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? by supernova_hq · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't know about everyone else, but the reason It was recommended to me (and why I recommend it to everyone else), is the amazing hardware detection and driver list that is automatically installed. When looking at other distros (slackware, fedora, etc.) I was looking up down and upside down finding sound drivers, wireless drivers, video drivers, and so on; but Ubuntu found and installed them, then ASKED if I wanted the binary ones as well!

  2. Re:People supporting Redhat supports community dis by wrook · · Score: 5, Informative

    Support is not where the money is for free software IMHO. And actually, although I'm not in the loop for these companies I don't think either of them make most of their money from "commercial" style support.

    The big money is either in custom distribution builds or in custom software development (or both). Usually you sell a "support contract" with it too, but it's more of an extended warranty than a real support contract.

    I once had an interesting talk with a salesman from Novell (who is a big free software fan). He told me that he doesn't try to sell support contracts for Linux. Instead he's more interested in providing upgrade paths for existing Netware customers. These products run on Linux and to compete against Microsoft's offerings they need a full package deal (office suite, email, etc, etc). In fact, from his description of what they were doing, I got the impression that the support side was still being run as a "loss center" rather than a "profit center".

    To make a long story shorter, successful free software companies will make money providing specific solutions to customers. Those that rely on "generic" (IMHO, useless) end user support will die an ugly death. However, I don't believe that any of Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, IBM, Sun, etc, etc are trying to base their business on end user support.

    So we can expect to see more of the same.