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

[William Park]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:37:33PM -0400, Lori Paniak wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 21:23 -0400, Paul Nijjar wrote:
> > On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 09:53:24PM -0400, Lori Paniak 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.  
> > 
> > When reading about website design, the part I don't get is the talk
> > of supporting "two, three browsers".  Yes, there are differences
> > between browser implementations, but deep down, HTML is HTML and CSS
> > is CSS and JavaScript is JavaScript. 
> > 
> > - Paul
> > 
> 
> Zing!
> 
> Yeah, what's up with that? Too bad there aren't any web standards...
> 
> Actually I'd put your example in the (logically) "superficial"
> category.  The backend is the same for the web pages you serve - only
> the end wrapper has to be tweaked for pretty pictures to appear in the
> correct places.  You don't have to re-write mysql for each different
> browser.  I hope.

>From application companies POV, you're limited to many people you can
pay to support how many Linux distros out there.  From Linux vendor POV,
it's product differentiation and marketing (ie. vendor lockin).

But, all in all, it's about money.  When they say they support Windows,
they mean "Windows XP/ME/Vista/7/2000/2003/2008 + all SP1/2/3/4
permutations".  Why?  Because they know that people running Windows are
willing to spend money.  Likewise, they support "RedHat 7/8/9/4.x/5.x",
because people runing RedHat are more likely to have paid for Redhat
support, and hence more like to pay them for support.

-- 
William