Comments on: Ubuntu Server Edition: Gaining Momentum?

By: rotyyu

rotyyu — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:24:16 +0000

it’ll be great to see Ubuntu in server competition with another enterprise distro…

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:15:16 +0000

I like lattes too, but recently I’ve had a desire to down the new Orange Mango Banana Vivanno. October is coming up so the Pumpkin Spice latte is back!!! Nothing like monitoring servers, creating accounts, setting up VMs from the comfort of a local Starbucks. Oh and Ubuntu rocks, but I’m committed to Fedora.

By: Dave Lane

Dave Lane — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:15:31 +0000

@Lawrence, not sure what you mean about “these guys be so centred around PHP”… Are “these guys” Canonical or Egressive?

I’m not sure I understand the stigma of PHP you’re implying… I can think of quite a few of the biggest virtual edifices on the ‘net that are built with PHP, and it’s not because the authors didn’t have other choices (I’m thinking Yahoo, Facebook, the mountain of major sites built on Drupal, Cake, Symphony, even Joomla)… I think PHP is a very valid tool when used by those aware and mindful of its limitations (as with any other tool). At least it’s open source.

On what technology would you rather that “these guys” be centred? Any software business needs to select a small number of technologies on which to focus its energies – doing otherwise spreads things too thin and creates unacceptable costs/risk because a reputable business must maintain ongoing skills in every technology it has ever used commercially.

Regards,

Dave Lane

By: The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:09:55 +0000

@Lawrence: Sure, Canonical “is a business intended to make a profit.” So are dozens of other open source firms that haven’t cracked the code for profits yet. The VAR Guy is hopeful Canonical will succeed, but needs to do some dumpster diving before he can make informed statements about Canonical’s finances.

By: Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Lawrence D'Oliveiro — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:24:08 +0000

Just a note that, while the Ubuntu Foundation may be nonprofit, Canonical is a business intended to make a profit.

Shame to see these guys be so centred around PHP. Most of the experiences I’ve been having with PHP and the type of people who use it just leave a sour stink…

By: The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:36:05 +0000

@Scott: Ouch. That last line was a pretty strong parting shot at The VAR Guy. But The VAR Guy respects your points. In fact, he agrees: More folks (including The VAR Guy) have to investigate Canonical's financial stability and strategy, and it has to involve more than Mark Shuttleworth's bank account balance. Oh, but one more thing: Be sure to check out the Works With U 1000, a fast-growing list of businesses and organizations running Ubuntu desktops and servers. Over time, the list (and its members) should reveal how Ubuntu is performing as a business platform. The VAR Guy will now step off of his soap box, and return to sipping his latte. (Grande, of course.)

By: Scott Dowdle

Scott Dowdle — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:30:51 +0000

Ubuntu / Canonical has a business plan? What would that be? So far as I know, they are a charity.

Unless Canonical is making money from these business deployments you mention, it really doesn’t help them… just as massive free desktop deployments don’t directly help them either… unless they have paying support customers.

I would imagine there are a lot of business deployments using Ubuntu Server for free… but then they wouldn’t really be competing with Red Hat and Novell. They’d be competing with Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and openSUSE… and all the other free distributions.

CentOS has a few million deployments (as I understand it, I don’t have any data to prove that just as it is hard to prove the Ubuntu deployments) but Red Hat and Novell have no trouble calculating their paying customers. If Canonical is really making it with their business plan, then they should have some numbers to report.

varguy, why don’t you investigate that and then you’ll have some real comparison data… and won’t have to guess?