Government spooks helped Microsoft build Vista

[Evan Leibovitch]

Rick Tomaschuk wrote:
> What are the options to eliminate Microsoft products (possibly even Novell) from a
> company IT repertoire? I know Debian, Xandros and Ubuntu are popular but
> lack any long term impact on the market.
Mark Shuttleworth is doing his darndest to position Ubuntu/Canonical as
the global #3, and that is starting to bear fruit. Ubuntu is making
Debian business friendly in a way that Xandros, Corel, Linspire and the
Debian team itself have never really succeeded. There are still warts by
the bagful in the Ubuntu model but they've come a very long way, despite
some odd geography. (Canonical's having its headquarters in the Isle of
Man can legitimately make one wonder if it's all one big
community-supported tax dodge.) Still, lots of people have admire Debian
but feared its seeming hostility to business and internal politics.
Ubuntu has offered a very stable way to embrace the Debian way to Linux,
even if the Debian team themselves aren't too happy about it. I think
it's way premature to declare that Ubuntu is without impact (though they
will probably concentrate on SMBs and leave the multinationals to Red
Hat and Novell).

Of course, don't forget about the second-tier commercial distributions
that are slowly growing:
- Mandriva, which is very strong in South America and Europe west of Germany
- The Asianux project with partners in Japan, China and Korea (one of
which is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Japan, MiracleLinux)

Also not to be forgotten is Oracle. Together with IBM and HP, they are
big into Linux -- and business IT -- without making their own distros.
The landscape could change dramatically if any of these make major
changes in what they support, or if any decide to do their own
distribution. I don't see Oracle's "red hat support" strategy as having
much success beyond the short term -- watch them to do something
interesting...

> Most distributions are not US based.
There are plenty of US-based distros (Centos, PCLinuxOS, I think Mepis.
Gentoo) but you may be limiting yourself to highly-funded commercial ones.

> This has advantages and disadvantages. Non US based distributions lack market capitalization resulting in more complex support
> arrangements. Berkley OS (Unix) require significant programming skills and are not commercially supported. So this leaves RedHat. IBM, HP and other Unixes are a world unto themselves. If SCO wasn't so stupid they would be a good choice.
Yeah, when they first merged (or whatever happend) with Caldera I
thought it had a really good potential -- Caldera's technology and grasp
of Linux together with SCO's traditional affinity with small-systems
integrators and VARs.

Oh well.

- Evan

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