It’s far too early to press the panic button. But anecdotal evidence is mounting that Canonical’s server push hasn’t gained much momentum.
Admittedly, the press (myself included) was guilty of hyping Ubuntu on the server. Throughout 2007, many observers speculated that Dell would announce server systems certified with Ubuntu. And by early 2008, as Canonical prepped Ubuntu 8.04, there were rumblings about other server vendors climbing on board.
But so far, Sun Microsystems is the only big server vendor to endorse Ubuntu in a big way. Dell has taken a wait-and-see approach, and Hewlett-Packard and IBM seem happy enough with Red Hat Linux and Novell SuSE Linux.
I had hoped that we’d hear some server news at Ubuntu Live — a conference that had been scheduled for July 2008 in Portland, Oregon. But Canonical canceled the event in order to focus on smaller, regional conferences.
Still, there’s a piece of me that suspects Ubuntu Live was canceled because Canonical couldn’t line up enough sponsors. Canonical has a lot on its plate — mobile, desktop, server and other Ubuntu editions would keep any small company busy. I wonder if true server momentum was too much to expect this year.
Also, keep this in mind: Microsoft initially released Windows NT Advanced Server 3.1 in 1993. But it wasn’t until the release of NT Server 4.0 around 1996 that the operating system began to gain some traction.
Microsoft had deep pockets, and it still took four years to have an impact on the server. I wonder if the open source model will allow Canonical to gain traction even faster.
Where’s the Ubuntu Server Push? Possibly went with the PPC support. Canonical seems to be getting in the habit of supporting only the most popular technologies. Both server and ppc could be supported with minimal overhead.
I think it’s more a matter of Canonical getting more application providers to aggressively promote server applications on Ubuntu. Until then, server hardware makers won’t sense market “pull” for Ubuntu-certified servers.
I think the problem is that the world is full of distributions and ubuntu seem to have a mentality of “Ubuntu” everything, the problem with this is that the difference between ubuntu and fedora for example, its about 1%, so with so little difference, does anyone REALLY care about yet another server distro?
Ubuntu has pushed the graphical user interface in some great directions, but lets not forget where that has led them, down a path of being user interface innovators and developers.
How many of those people are capable of putting together a sufficiently different server os, considering all the tools to do those things are not ubuntu branded, not even close.
Does that mean they shouldnt bother? no, of course not, more resources on this the better, what I think the best course of action however, is not a ubuntu server distro, but contributing to other tools and services which everyone supports anyway and saving the money form the costly promotional aspects which effectively earn you nothing.
Most of the changes in ubuntu, if that amazing, were copied at zero cost anyway, so the money was pushed into the development, how much of that money would be wasted in a server effort? (cause it’s not sexy!)
I think it’s better that they stop this ubuntu everything madness and start concentrating on working with everyone else, instead of working separately, it’s costly and expensive and the more failures you get, even unjustly, the more of a failure you look, even if it’s unjustly. Better to save your strength for battles you can win, or hope to enter.
chris
What kills me is that people have in their head that if the OS is free than there is no commercial support. They rely on Red Hat where they spend thousands of dollars for support they may never need and completely overlook Ubuntu where they can pay for support if they need it. Well I don’t care what vendor announcements were supposed to come through or not. I still use Ubuntu and find it to be satisfactory for everything I need.
Distro(s) like CentOS are what’s preventing in-roads into the data center. Why else do you think RH doesn’t mind having them around? RH could’ve been the one to offer a free vers which receives updates but does not support, but oh well, they didn’t. Same reason why Oracle didn’t release a re-branded vers w/o support but with updates for free because of CentOS. But we’re talking x86 here, not PPC…
[...] have joined others in wondering about Ubuntu on the server. Canonical highlighted broad OEM support with its release of 8.04 Hardy [...]
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but we’ve been rolling out Ubuntu servers commercially since Hoary Hedgehog. We’ve been able to leverage our extensive desktop experience (we’re also a developer shop that runs Ubuntu on the desk/thin-client top) as the desktop use cases allow us to develop expertise in some of the same subsystems our servers run. Many open source IT companies in New Zealand seem to be gravitating towards Ubuntu on both the server and the desktop, because a) it’s brilliant for both, and b) it’s clearly going places. The diversity of open source means that the market can pick the winners, not the monopolies.
By the way, I have yet to see a commercial hosting provider who doesn’t offer Ubuntu VMs and other forms of hosting alongside Debian, CentOS, and SuSE. If the hosting market is anything to go by, Ubuntu is already a (perhaps *the*) preferred choice based on my sampling data. Has anyone ever done a comprehensive study? With the lack of sales figures on Ubuntu, it could be far more prevalent than any of the corporates think, and I believe it is.
Ok, I’ll just go ahead and say it: it’s not stable enough for servers. If you want a stable ubuntu-like system, use Debian. It was designed for stability. The desktop is Ubuntu’s forte.
Where’s Ubuntu servers? Where are the ubuntu server application certifications? Red Hat is the leader and will be the leader for a long time to come simply because it has a huge number of certified applications for its servers. Corporations (especially large and medium size Corporations) want assurances (certifications) that their application mix is certified from top to bottom by the OS/hardware vendors. Red Hat has a huge lead over Novell on certified solutions, so that’s a competitive advantage for Red Hat over Novell. Novell is adding certifications as fast as possible, but Red Hat started first in this area and has outpaced Novell, CentOS, Debian and others. So until Ubuntu can provide a huge number of certified solutions for their hardware, Ubuntu won’t come close in the enterprise server space.
Diane @10: You hit the nail on the head. Unlike the traditional “community” approach of open source, the corporate market requires “certified” applications from business software providers.
Microsoft nailed this model by getting apps certified on Windows NT in order to compete with NetWare and Unix in the 1990s. Red Hat has used a similar model to ensure it has a massive ISV base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Canonical will need a similar initiative for Ubuntu on corporate servers.
Lucky for most of us Linux experts who developed our expertise almost inadvertently – at university or on the job (or both) – many (most?) businesses – particularly technical companies – don’t hire based on certs. Certainly here in NZ, admittedly a small market, certifications will most likely elicit a blank stare or a chuckle (particularly MSCEs) rather than a job offer…
As for what Schmoe has to say about Ubuntu being less stable than Debian… well, that’s probably a fair comment, however, oddly enough, stability isn’t everything (although, in my experience, an Ubuntu Linux server can be pretty rock solid). In some cases it’s a matter of having a suitably up-to-date hosting environment for certain applications, and in that situation a more tried-and-true Debian stable system won’t cut it. Everything’s a compromise.
@Diane: Why include Debian & CentOS in the mix? CentOS is RHEL, why would a community based distro look for ISV(s)???? Same w/ Debian, community based distro, they don’t care if you run it on a sewing machine….
Of course RH has a head start (okay, a mile long head start) on the game. It took them years and it unfortunately took them removing RH from being a completely free distro to being a distro that you have to pay for JUST TO GET UPDATES, let alone a ton of extra money to get support for. Now, the community is left with an unusable pile to test & play with (Fedora). Novell saw the writing on the wall and followed suit w/ SUSE…
Have you made your resolutions yet? ,
SouthWind48: We’ll be watching the Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10 launch closely for potential server system news plus cloud momentum…
@dca:
I take issue with your characterization of Fedora as more unstable than the RHL releases that preceded it. That sort of comment requires a pretty impressive historical deep dive into Red Hat’s bugzilla system in order to back it up. Are you up for that? I look forward to your detailed analysis.
But if that historical deep dive is too much work and all you really want to do is character assassinate the Fedora distriubtion compared to current distribution peers…I’m more than prepared to point out stability problems in each and every single Ubuntu release (including LTS releases) that are as severe as anything seen in Fedora releases of the same vintage.
-jef