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.
It's quite likely there are companies providing the type of thing Im talking about already - I haven't really looked.
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.
not sure which distro is dominant on scaled projects but Ubuntu gets plenty of use on large projects too - from the article:
"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"
"Article" is one word for it, a more specific phrase would be "press release".
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."
As far as I have seen it's actually dominant in general. The only stats I found[1] say it is totally dominant in EC2 deployments (55% of the total with second place with 24% being a generic "linux").
RedHat has carved out a huge chunk of the in between space. RedHat sells to people who buy support contracts. Some guy running a personal email server doesn't have the money and the likes of Netflix doesn't need it because they have the expertise in-house. You see a lot of RedHat in corporate IT departments.
Having (or better, limiting yourself to) a single vendor is not standardization at all, in my opinion.
I'm not talking about having a single vendor in a single company at a certain point in time - that's good, doing differently is hard to manage (since usually the sysadmin team is really too small).
I'm talking about having all the sysadmin jobs in my area using Linux as a synonym for Red Hat Linux.
I hope that's not the only standardization we will get, since I don't really like vendor lock-ins (talking about Windows...) and I think we need something better than that.
Take a look at SuSE. They're ridiculously quiet, but I gather from their employees that they are pretty much lazer-focused on serving business needs and thus are doing well as a company.
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.