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Why Linux Vendors Need To Sell More Than Linux
jfruh writes "Mandriva, a venerable Linux distro, is on the verge of shutting down. One of its main problems is that it never grew into more than just an OS vendor. The big players in the commercial Linux space — Red Hat, SuSE, Canonical — all built Linux into their larger computing visions. Is there any room in the marketplace for just a straight-up Linux distro anymore?"
slackware!
No.
The long answer:
No. There is no viable desktop market for Linux currently, and probably never will be, and that is pretty much the ONLY market where a just OS approach may have even had a tiny amount of a possibility of succeeding.
Someone will clone the distro and everyone has the bandwidth to download it.
Palm trees and 8
Is there any room in the marketplace for just a straight-up Linux distro anymore?
That depends on what you mean by "marketplace". If this includes free, then sure -- we've still got Slackware, Debian, Mint, and I don't know what all else.
But then, the question is loaded, and presumes that Mandriva's fall is solely due to the marketability of a Linux distro. But looking at the history, Mandriva was never that well run as an organization, with fits and starts and general policy confusion. For all its warts, Canonical's stewardship of Ubuntu at least has a direction. I suffered through many months with broken repo settings and no clear fixes as Mandrake/Mandriva went through a couple of its identity crises and infrastructure paroxysms, and these ultimately prompted me to leave them behind.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
then its not worthwhile in the commercial space. SuSE marketshare is dropping and when did canonical every really have marketshare? Either you're big enough to do your own, have enough skills to maintain your own, or you buy RHEL.
Peter.
... the most boring part of the computer for 90% of the population. You have to have something your end customers actually care about. I look at things like steam and I don't know why Linux devs didn't think of creating a platform around linux to begin with. While power user computing is great for the power users, the great unwashed really just want something ridiculously simple and easy. There is really no real reason to use linux. If I were trying to sell linux, I'd create a plaform like steam and sell non-drm'd software. Open source really has to start 'charging' for it's software if it hopes to be sustainable in creating apps/things people want in the future. Money is not a dirty word. You can still make money with open computing. With all the copyright bullshit linux could have a good opening if they'd just get on the ball and create a business out of it.
Linux suffers from being suffocated by geeks who really don't grasp that the user doesn't want to have to think, the user wants a magic box that adds value to their lives. This is why things like Steam took off and 'app stores'.
I can see an argument being made that people don't want an "operating system", they want a computer. And when most people say computer, they don't mean the box. That's what geeks say. When an average person says computer, they mean all the applications, peripherals, internet access, etc., that all gets packed into the magic box.
Linux and its supporters have never quite managed to grasp the Magic Box school of thought. Until they do, they'll never be a competitor. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one. Look at Apple. First we ignored them, then we laughed at them, then somehow, overnight, OS X became a contender and Apple became a massive corporation. How did that happen?
Hint: Apple doesn't sell 'operating systems' or 'ipads' or whatever. They are selling an experience. And if you ask the average person what the Linux experience is... they'll look at you, facepalm, and say flatly "I couldn't get the damn thing to work."
Linux vendors need to sell an experience, not a product. It needs to be well-supported, preconfigured with everything the average person wants on a computer (or whoever their target demographic is... IT managers, server lackies, whatever...), so all they do is push the button and there it is. It. Just. F*cking. Works.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Most Linux distros lack a sustainable business model. They expect people to pay for something they can get for free.
RedHat and Suse are both a success because it's not just a distro. It's also a support structure for the OS, which is what businesses need.
Many times, a technical person looks at it and does not care. "Let me use my favorite distro this week.". But what happens when that person leaves the company and a new guy comes in with experience in a different distro? Sure, we can catch on as techies.. it's what we do. But it's a gap to get there in time, which can cost a whole lot of money.
I'm sure Redmond does not mind as many fragments as possible. Honestly it's hurt Linux much more than it's helped as far as business adaptation.
Lets face facts: Execs want numbers, not quirks. Show them how much money they can save by going with RedHat, response time on support issues, security information for SOX and E&Y auditors, etc.. and that's your ticket in. "My Gnome tool bar roxxors in Favlinux 6.0zers" is not something businesses want, need, or look at.
Frags are fine for the geeks that want to play. I'm sure there are some good things that come out of those and get added back in to the stream for Business Linux. I can't count any, but I'm sure someone has some. Just keep it out of the VP's office, and get them a supported version of Linux.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It is not about "cloning the distro". Anyone can download the tree in its current state. The value added is in the talent that maintains the codebase, makes improvements, applies the latest security updates, implements bugfixes, and helps the product evolve. In the case of Mandriva, there is Mageia, which is made up of many of the maintainers from Mandriva who have anticipated trouble and decided to break away from Mandriva. In other words, Mandriva the company can die, and Mandriva the product essentially lives on as Mageia.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
> Theres a reason that after 20+ years Windows has won.
Yes. The market was already dominated by MS-DOS.
All of these "helpful suggestions" are just total nonsense that tend to ignore the actual facts.
The differences between the various flavors of Linux are mostly overblown. They all use the same basic core components. Although some are better at "packaging" than others, libfoo is still libfoo whether it's Ubuntu or Mandrake.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One big (should I say HUGE) reason what cause someone drop out from markets is that someone else enters to same market and is not depending sale income like the others already on market.
Example. Canonical would not exist if Mark Shuttleworth would not be spending his personal money to artificially maintain Canonical up.
The situation is exactly the same as someone is selling handmade product A on corner of street and every penny what is gained, is needed so the production can be maintained. Then one rich guy choose to drive that person away from the market. So he use money what his daddy has and as his daddy is millionaire, the new kid on the block can lower the street price and steal customers. No one can not compete against that one.
Same problem is with stock markets... Not all people can get enough loans to start a new company. Especially when there are bigger corporations with dominant market position or other way a constant incomes what they can spend.
Microsoft can do what ever it wants with money what it gets from Windows and Office sale... And it does not need to compete to maintain that money... WIth that money, Microsoft has maintained PC dominant market position and bought the gaming console markets for itself and even is now buying the smart phone markets for itself unless customers steps against it. Sony made same thing with PS3 on the HD DVD and Blu-ray war. They bought the market with PS3 Blu-ray drive.
Canonical has done same thing for Mandriva and other commercial Linux distributors what has been dependable of income of selling their distribution, their support, their service and maintenance tools etc.
Starting a company first by gathering funds for it, is needed when everyone are small on market and there is space for everyone. But when you are competing against big corporation, they can just wipe their asses and light their cicarettes with bills and laugh doing it while driving competitors away.
If Mark Shuttleworth would really want to support Open Source, he would have spended money directly to different Open Source projects, instead starting a own company in tax paradise (Man Island) to avoid taxes and starting a own distribution while same time stealing name of Linux operating system and promote their own Ubuntu distribution as "new Operating System". And while doing that, Mark has blessed the actions to steal income from other upstream projects like Banshee.
And the goal of the Mark was to gain enough fanatic Ubuntu followers who would support and price Canonical like it would be Apple 2.0 and that way to drive everyone out of the markets by giving the false information how Canonical is making a own OS, how they are the developing party of Open Source Projects and how they have managed to get everything up what they include in Ubuntu, leaving the upstream, original developers and communities without mentioning.
All that is legal, but it is not ethical or anyway related to Open Source honorable ethics. It is like stealing others fame and doings by presenting them as own...
RedHat, Suse and Canonical all sell support, not Linux and other Open Source software. You pay for RedHat (the most successful FOSS vendor) to have access to RHN for package updates, someone to call for support, training and certification, and a conduit back into the FOSS community. Suse is similar. Canonical still has a way to go in the enterprise space but has a solid financial backer, and is making money using FOSS to provide services. In fact you can include Amazon, Google and a host of others as successful companies that leverage FOSS to provide services.
And every major version update still fucks up all my video card configurations (not to mention a bunch of other stuff). Try explaining to your wife over the phone: "Sorry baby, you shouldn't have hit update while I was at work. It's simple, just open up the terminal on the desktop, SSH to the laptop and replace xorg.conf with xorg.conf-backup". Her responding being, "This computer is stupid. Why can't we use windows like normal people?".
The whole premise of this article is wrong. During the time when Mandriva was Mandrake, the Linux OS part of Mandrake was profitable. However, they diversified into Educational Products, that were going to be sold to European schools. That business lost a ton of money. They went bankrupt and reformed as Mandriva.
Ubuntu sort of took the power user desktop niche away and I don't know if Mandriva could have been successful with Ubuntu there. But Mandrake did exactly what the article suggests.
No. People universally distrust penguins. They are too cocky and pretentious in their little tux's. If only penguins were sweet and juicy like an apple and translucent like a window. Instead we get these little bone and blood filled over-dressed pests that you can't see through at all.
Did you try urpmi? That's the equivalent to apt-get for Mandriva and Mageia.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Redhat for instance only has a few percent of the packaged apps of Debian.
To be fair, the 'core' RHEL packages are a bit more thoroughly tested than Debian's universe. There are also add-on repositories, though RHEL doesn't make it quite as trivial to add. An example of it not being so rosy on the debian side, the roundcube webmail package was (still is?) completely unusable as it calls out a php configuration that will not be implemented by the current php packages. An upstream update to roundcube was available to work with the newer php situation, but debian had packaged the newer php and older roundcube, making things *not* 'just work' and indeed forcing you to leave the .dpkg versions behind if you wanted it to work.
The package manager for Redhat is inferior.
I have no qualms about rpm compared to dpkg. With yum, I also have no qualms compared to apt. I will say rpm more elegantly coped with the i386/x86_64 mix than I saw .dpkg based distros achieve.
Upgrades are a non-event with Debian, Redhat recommends a clean install and migrate data for every upgrade.
You *can* upgrade RHEL in pretty much the same way. Just like debian, however, there are some awkward scenarios when you do it that way on occasion. For example, my php install was hosed on my last dist-upgrade. Some stale config files for a formerly external module (IIRC, sqlite) brought all php scripts to a halt. It wasn't difficult for most skilled admins to identify the issue and resolve, but it represents an unknown/unexpected delay and there are many Enterprise IT shops that would actually be stopped in their tracks until someone came and bailed them out.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'd have done it myself if my mod points didn't vanish yesterday. I've certainly been the sort of geek who hasn't done well in communicating with others when it comes to technical matters. Despite years of bugging friends and family members to "just get a Mac" every time I had to give out free tech support, no one ever did because I didn't/couldn't articulate the reasons why this would be a good idea. I think I've learnt my lesson, and have been able to get people to at least start playing with *nix by actually *showing* how it's not so scary to use and how easy it is to run plenty of Windows software through WINE.
It's called user control and privacy. 99.95% of people don't care about that too much, but every Megaupload that happens inches people a bit closer to realizing that no control is maybe not all that free.
It's interesting that the Department of Defense in the US is using more and more open source software, even while lots of people are saying "My data? Who cares?" Once control is worth something to you, there's no real alternative, ultimately, to FOSS. Or writing your own custom software.
Mandriva was also selling Mandriva Directory Server - which was a good product IMO. Isn't providing management/services products making them "more than just an OS vendor"?. Novell was doing exactly the same thing with eDirectory/Zenworks.
Indeed I just moved from Mandriva to Ubuntu because the last Mandriva update crashed everything on my machine. And I was almost shocked to find Ubuntu *easier* than OSX on a couple of point (e. g. capable to run an external 3G modem without extra sw install, and share immediately this connection via wifi straight from a permanently visible system menu).
So probably yes I'm among those non-geek users that have been driven to Ubuntu just because of its fame. But it works.
Whenever I have some time I'll try a couple of other distros among those you advocate for here -but indeed this requires time. And Mandriva borking its upgrade didn't overmotivate me...
Herve S.
Microsoft's juggernaut rolls on your back, precisely because MS depends on geeks like you to do all the hard work that people think is free. If everyone had to pay for the $1000 of your time you gave away, they would see the advantages of Linux or even Mac. So stop insulting yourself by giving your time away for free... aren't you worth it? Let people really understand the pain of Microsoft.