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

Re:Ubuntu is corporate

[lamapper]

Yes, ubuntu server is indeed every bit as solid as RHEL or SLES, and enterprise support contracts are available from canonical. ...I remember oracle telling me in 1998 that they don't support linux, and that I should try sco. muahaha.

I was in a telecommunications company at that time, heavy Oracle, some DB2 and some other databases also. We were also a heavy Sun and IBM shop running IBM OS/2 and Microsoft on the desktops, except in development where everything was Unix, Sun and Solaris.

I too heard Oracle say that they would never run Oracle on Linux...thanks for the memory!

Another thought, as many developers look for new jobs, I like many, look for companies that leverage Linux. I have and will continue to say NO to Microsoft ONLY and Oracle ONLY shops.

Oh BTW, MySQL most definitely will scale, its fun to see companies wake up to this fact and migrate away from Oracle, saving hundreds of thousands in the process.

After over 10 years of living there (Microsoft especially and Oracle..) I can see the writing on the wall, and want to have a more prosperous and even more successful future.

A mixed Linux and "other" shop is okay too, as is a Linux ONLY shop. I see a future there!

However, if the company is not leveraging Linux to profit their bottom line, then I question the ability and knowledge of upper management. Perhaps they are simply too slow, which jeopardizes my job in the future.

In this, or any economy, I cannot afford to be put out of a job due to poor business decisions.