I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.
It does make me wonder though if it would ever be possible for a bunch of business savy open source developers could ever get around to creating an open source co-op. Something like the commercial version of the FSF. Build open source products with solid support contracts, and build/contribute to open source that way.
The organization would be owned by the very people building and contributing the code.
RedHat is the only company that I can see that really did everything in the open.
I'm not sure which one I feel worse about, Oracle buying Sun, or IBM buying RedHat? I feel that Oracle did some major missteps in their acquisition (for this I look squarely at OpenOffice, and their misshandling of it, although, the OOo community hated the Oracle acquisition from day one, which I guess might have made it a little like poison berries - no one would want to go near it).
Oracle completely ruined MySQL during the acquisition too.
What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?
I'd suggest building an auto-upgrade system on top of Arch (or Alpine), and go for immutable infrastructure as the selling point. That's stepping on CoreOS's toes a bit, but I haven't seen any progress from that crowd ever since Red Hat bought them, so it'll probably get even worse now.
That way you can target AWS/Azure/$OTHER_MODERN_STUFF in a more focused way, and you won't be stuck on supporting months/years old versions of the OS.
In that case, why not go all the way over to NixOS? They already have a more or less complete cloud stack with NixOps, the only problem is hardly anyone knows how to use it.
That's a massive, show-stopping problem.
How so?
I agree that it's a nontrivial problem to learn a piece of complex software from scratch to the point that you can offer comprehensive enterprise support for it, but how is that show-stopping?
I'm not sure what the cause is. If it's a fundamental technological problem, then it's insurmountable, but if it's just a documentation problem, then it might be fixable. It doesn't look good though, since, like I said, the whole stack has existed for a long time. You would think that something would've been done about it.
All that said, perhaps I'm just dumb. I'll be happy to see someone prove me wrong and succeed with that combo. The underlying technology is certainly interesting and powerful. But I won't be trying it.