[kwlug-disc] How Canonical makes money ...

[John Van Ostrand]

----- "Lori Paniak" <ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com> wrote:

> The part I don't get is the talk of supporting "two, three distros".
> Yes, there are differences between the distributions, but deep down,
> gcc is gcc, X is X and Linux is Linux.  
> 
> I don't know anything about SUSE, but it seems that differences 
> between
> RHEL/CentOS and deb systems, when it comes to end-user applications,
> are
> typically rather superficial: file locations, command name/syntax
> variance, packaging philosophy.  Supporting both is essentially a
> matter
> of working out these differences at the packaging level.  The same
> application code is used to create the deb or rpm.
> 
> Looking at the specs of Ubuntu 10.4 LTS and RHEL 6, you might be
> hard-pressed to tell them apart.

I agree. But until one of us puts a big proprietary application on several distros we won't really know what it's like.

Maybe big bureaucracies see knowledge base updates and setup script testing and regression testing and all the other baggage those organizations need for applications as being just too expensive to justify. When all they have to say is "just put it on RHEL" and all customers comply grudgingly or not. A price may only be put on it when a competing product starts taking market share away because it supports Ubuntu. I'm thinking apps like Oracle just don't have competition that threatens them enough.

-- 
John Van Ostrand 
CTO, co-CEO 
Net Direct Inc. 
564 Weber St. N. Unit 12, Waterloo, ON N2L 5C6 
Ph: 866-883-1172 x5102 
Fx: 519-883-8533 

Linux Solutions / IBM Hardware