When you go to the meeting, there is a recommendation to the board to spend money. The recommendation is always for the end product, not the underlying platform. No one cares about the underlying platform, only the users’ need. In this case Weblogic is being adopted for a new city wide project. Weblogic does not support Ubuntu. It would be fiscal and managerial insanity to buy Weblogic, and pay for Weblogic implementation professionals at $350 per hour to save $2,500 on licensing of Red Hat over Ubuntu. The board and the technology professionals use Red Hat, because it is used for other projects, Red Hat is Linux, Red Hat is supported, and because it is the right business decision.

The platform has to start with end users running the applications on the platform. Until Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft, Websphere, Weblogic and Veritas are supported, your talking like the guy with the aluminum hat standing on the street corner. This is business, not advocacy.

If you disagree with me, go to your city council or IT open meeting and stand up and tell them how you feel. I’ll look for you at my meetings.

We suspect most Ubuntu users want LAMP and open source applications. But for those who want Oracle and SAP, among others, that’s certainly a limitation at the current time and it’s clear that neither Oracle nor SAP have any near-term plans for Ubuntu.

It’s a matter of fulfilling customer demand. Most traditional “enterprises” may not be aware of Ubuntu Server Edition yet. But we are seeing Ubuntu pop up on more and more business servers. Check out our Works With U 1000 list for a look at a few companies running Ubuntu servers.

I’m not suggesting Ubuntu is perfect, but it’s momentum is growing.