Businesses Choosing "Community" Linux Distros

Posted by kdawson on Monday September 1, 2008 @12:03AM 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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Not according to GPL zealots by Chemisor · 2008-09-01 03:21 · Score: 0, Flamebait

As we are constantly reminded by the GPL zealots, the only "moral" way to make money from your software is to release it under the GPL for free and then charge for support. The article gives a fine example, IMO, why this business plan will fail and if anyone makes money from your GPL software, it would not be you.