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Comment by jzb | Hacker News Reader

I understand embarrassment, but anger might be misplaced. Red Hat was a newly public company trying to turn a profit. It identified its market and Red Hat Linux wasn't serving it, and the model they were pursuing with Red Hat Linux wasn't working.

But I am a solid supporter of the "pay for RHEL or use Debian" philosophy. If you need promises about the future, pay for RHEL or use a project that doesn't have commercial motives. Debian is great and I wish more companies would standardize on it and support it.

I'm not such a fan of the middle road of hoping that vendors will continue supplying things of value for free. It's especially ironic that an insurance vendor got burned by placing a bet on a free operating system with no assurances whatsoever. The RHEL subscription is insurance.

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Pay for RHEL or use Ubuntu

Edit: I guess people don’t like Ubuntu that much

Both Canonical and Ubuntu have their own share of problems, and they've been struggling to monetize Ubuntu for the past few years. Once you get burned by one commercial vendor (not once actually… it's the third time afaik), it's probably wise to use this opportunity for migrating to a more stable distribution where commercial interest doesn't have much influence, and which has never intentionally burned its users (since Debian developers are users too and are also doing it for themselves).

Heh. Saw the edit, but responding anyway. Canonical has its own issues. I can overlook some, others (like forcing Snap on users) have put me off a lot.

Ubuntu did a lot to popularize Linux and make the Linux desktop experience more usable. It struggled for a long time to figure out how to monetize that, though. They seem to be profitable now[1] claiming a growth in revenue to $205.4m and operating profit of $44m with a headcount of 858 (up from 705 the prior year).

The "Ubuntu Pro" move this year (which also raised many hackles, briefly) will probably pad the coffers a bit more.

[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... (See "Group of companies' accounts" through December 2022. The PDF link is atrocious.)

I don’t see a reason to use Ubuntu over Debian

AKS and AKS Engine uses Ubuntu. From an Enterprise point of view, Ubuntu LTS and RHEL are more attractive.

For what reason? The certifications?

> Pay for RHEL or use Debian

In this climate, that is a solid philosophy

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