I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at least) is starting to tire me.
Forget this idea of a company that produces yet another fucking distro with just enough changes so its not 100% compatible with whatever it's forked from, and then charge for support.
How about a company that simply sells support services for an existing, community owned distro like Debian. If it makes sense for that company to donate to the Debian project, and/or hire staff to contribute to Debian packages to improve them, thats great too.
In the early 2000s, HP had committed to supporting Debian, but I no longer see it listed on their Linux Support page.
I know the european market has a healthy ecosystem of consultant companies that provide support for open source products.
My point was more that this is the type of thing people/companies should be looking for in a Linux support contract, rather than another "services" company rolling it's own Linux distro so they can lock customers in with incompatibility.
"Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu"
It's hard to tell from these lists how seriously a lot of those companies are relying on Ubuntu. Obviously some are (HP for example). But I've seen my own employers listed in press releases where us implementors were wondering "do we really still use that stuff? Oh yeah I think there may be a box or two still running that from when we were testing the waters."
I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
It's the only standardization that you're going to get in enterprise Linux and it's no different than targeting Windows.
> I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
And the problem with that is?
Silly me? I know. And still I don't like it.
Maybe I am still too young. :)
RHEL/CentOS aren't popular for the lack of alternatives, but more because that's what most sysadmins are used to use.