Businesses Choosing "Community" Linux Distros

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. "

Comments

network isp services

[eneville]

At the ISP I worked for, we used a mixture of Debian, OpenBSD and Windows. This was mainly for network tools. Generally there's little point in the "enterprise" distros since anyone who chooses their hardware wisely shouldn't really need that.

Re:network isp services

[betterunixthanunix]

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, and it often costs more to have an IT department handle everything than to have someone from Red Hat or Novell solve the problem. It is not just a question of hardware, it is also a question of software bugs, configuration problems, etc. Yes, any competent IT shop could take care of this, but that means devoting time that could otherwise be spent on business needs to solving little trivialities.

Or did you think the most successful financial companies in the world made an unplanned decision to pay Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Sun, etc. large amounts of money for technical support, when they could have just done it in house?

Re:network isp services

[vlm]

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.

Ubuntu is corporate

[Local Loop]

How is Ubuntu not a corporate distribution? There is a
corporation developing and releasing that
product, even if it is loosely based on Debian.

Re:Ubuntu is corporate

[Icarium]

Eh? They're referring to the target user base, not whether the distro in question is developed by a corporation or not.

How it's supposed to work.

[haeger]

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.

.haeger

Re:How it's supposed to work.

[wrook]

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, you've got to assume he understands this. If Red Hat doesn't listen, well, it's too bad for them...

Somebody will figure it out eventually. There's a lot of money to be made.

Re:How it's supposed to work.

[houghi]

Let's see if RH or SUSE has a business model that works according to this reality.

Not sure about RedHat, but Novell (with openSUSE) activaly sponsors openSUSE and has made it extremely easy to make an openSUSE basded distro

Almost all other tools are included as well, including the Build service 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.

Re:How it's supposed to work.

[init100]

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.

Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain

[monsul]

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

Re:Linux at the bottom, Mac OSX at the top

[jcn]

What I'm seeing across Europe is a growing use of not ABW (Anything but Windows) but WIW (What I Want).

I wonder, how does one observe the subtle difference between these?

If the article quote is true...

[CrackedButter]

isn't that better for the economy overall than paying private company x for a complete solution. At least doing it this way keeps money and jobs nearby.

openSUSE?

[houghi]

openSUSE is also a community distro where Novell is part of that community (as well as the sponsor).

A Question of Investment

[16K Ram Pack]

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...

Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain

[Anonymous Coward]

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 just between version 5, RH9 and Fedora Core versions.

Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain

[houghi]

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.

"corporate" linux?

[louzerr]

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.

Re:Linux at the bottom, Mac OSX at the top

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You moved your internal Emails (containing business-critical information and trade-secrets) to gmail? ARE YOU CRAZY?!

Some distros may need goal redefinition

[Yfrwlf]

It seems like several companies are still trying the tactic of software exclusivity, the same tactic the console companies are waging on one another. (In that arena, it's pretty unfortunate, too, as a lot of it just comes down to how much money you're willing to pay for exclusives, and Microsoft has the deepest pockets, or so their accountants claim.) This is something that cannot and should not occur in Linux as it hurts everyone. Part of software freedom is software accessibility, so when a new driver is created for example, it needs to be modular and easily pluggable into any Linux or Linux-like kernel, quickly and without hassle (the point of modules). Some companies are going to have to face the fact that they cannot get away with attracting everyone to their platform just because they have a certain software title, or just because they have large repositories.

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 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 and general Linux interoperability to give everyone more choice and thus more freedom.

Re:Works For Us ...

[lennier]

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 yourself to be working for, leases, purchases, suppliers going out of business, dongles, keys, codes (any or all of which may be allergic to any other if installed on the same machine), replacement codes, upgrade codes, Internet phone-home licences, lockouts which can bring your entire business to a screaming halt if you're so much as a day late in renewing.

Every licence is potentially a single point of failure for your entire business and they all multiply, they don't add.

Every open-source, free licence that doesn't mandate its own version of bureaucratic tracking overhead is simply one less moving part to break. Yes, you still have to track security patches but you don't have to be forced into upgrades by artificial accounting deadlines or restrictive shrink-wrap agreements.

What *wouldn't* a reliability-focused industry like spaceflight like about that?

Re:I saw that on a supermarket chain

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

I use both and I can tell you that Linux is more widely supported. You wouldn't see much difference between BSD and Linux if you're building a router, DNS server, etc, but when you start getting fancy, BSD becomes cumbersome. Imagine a laptop which runs Quake, webcam, chat with MSN, skype, etc, plus all the usual office junk and multimedia features(Linux wins here). Or try a server with some LAMPP, streaming audio/video, and some funky LDAP authentication backend. Linux is usually a lot eaiser to get running.