Debian Enterprise (not a Starfleet metaphor)

[johnie@nyip.net]

So at the last Bay Area Debian meeting we pondered and mused about
getting organized enough to provide commercial support for Debian.

I think one initial step would be to build a case for using Debian
commercially to begin with.  Right now Red Hat and their army of RHCEs
are stealing the thunder, and the business media usually manages to
imply that all-volunteer Linux distributions are shady, unreliable,
fly-by-night operations.

Somehow I suspect this isn't true, so I have two questions:

  1. Has anyone here run Debian for critical work -- say as RDBMS or
     part of a cluster of application servers, webservers etc. -- or
     read of that being done by others?  Or maybe as smart firewalls,
     or OpenOffice deployments that saved money compared to Windows....

  2. Will anyone admit to having docs for the commercial RedHat or
     United Linux dists, that would explain what is so great and
     "enterprise" about them?  (their kernel patches blah blah)
     I admit it, I'm not above borrowing ideas.

Since Red Hat is soon to abandon support for all but their $1000
product, this seems to create a perfect opening for promoting Debian,
its APT technology, and its well-organized developer community,
perhaps even winning over some lucky converts in the process.

Well, one can dream.

So If you can think of any key advantages Debian has over the
competition -- the RPM crowd and the gang from Redmond -- please let
me know.  I'll track down the people involved, write some case
studies, concoct a white paper or two, and see what happens.

Be well,

Johnie Ingram