Debian Enterprise (not a Starfleet metaphor)

[Jim Pick]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:14:05 -0800
"Sean 'Shaleh' Perry" <shaleh@speakeasy.net> wrote:

> I have used Debian quietly at work on numerous occasions.  It has *ALWAYS* 
> been a struggle.

Agreed.  My current job revolves around doing a port of Red Hat.   :-)

Things Red Hat has going for it:

 1) There's a company behind it.
 2) It's a well known company (having a billion dollar IPO helps)
 3) They have (had) a product-driven release cycle, so you could count
    on regular releases.

Of course, very few of their commercial users were actually paying for
it, so the business model didn't work, and so now there is Fedora. 

Debian could use more frequent releases, but that's hard to do with just
volunteers.  Maybe if they (we?) cut down the core distribution to a
manageable size.

Personally, I think the future of the desktop Linux space belongs to the
Knoppix-style distributions, building on top of the Debian base.  Debian
will never be super integrated -- it's got 8710 packages.  But a group
of motivated developers can put together a really nice, polished,
integrated desktop that will fit on a CD with just an incremental effort
if they harness the energies of KDE, Gnome, Debian, etc.

I think the server space is where Debian really shines.  All my servers
run Debian.  I don't mind running Debian stable -- a two year upgrade
cycle is just fine with me as long as the security updates are quick and
current, and the upgrades are super well tested (apt-get is painless
compared to the Red Hat alternative).  Server upgrades can be painful,
so having a slower release cycle isn't so much of a drawback.  Debian
provides the stable base, and I put my custom stuff on top of it.

Setting up a company to do a Red Hat style "enterprise" distribution
based on Debian?  Several companies have tried.  There's probably a
niche, but there's a lot of companies vying for it.  And those companies
all have to cover the salaries of their employees.  And Red Hat hasn't
even demonstrated that they've got a viable business there yet.

Personally, I think Debian is doing very well, thank you, in large
datacenter environments - but it isn't well publicized.  The downside is
that it works so good, for free, that it's not making the Debian
developers (that actually do the work) rich.  :-)

Cheers,

 - Jim