Hey<br><br>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 15/12/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">Steve Dobson</b> <<a href="mailto:steve@dobson.org">steve@dobson.org</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Morning All<br><br>First thanks to Nik for arranging last night.<br><br>In this morning's surfing I read an article [1] that puts Debian
<br>a strong second and Fedora third as the Linux distros used on<br>Web Hosting systems. Red Hat was first - no surprise there.<br>But isn't it nice to see that Debian, a community run project<br>with no company behind it, placed so highly?
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<div>Good for Debian, infact I believe this is a great choice for providers because of its stability.</div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">What surprised me the most was Gentoo's showing. Now before you hit<br>the reply button and cause me to put on my asbestos suit (please
<br>don't, it's just back from the cleaners after having the last set<br>of burn marks removed) I'm not getting at Gentoo. Gentoo is<br>a distro that I think as targeted at developers, or people who<br>want access to (or close to) the cutting edge.
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<div>why...... the hell does this supprise you, if you just think clearing about this what to most people want, PERFORMANCE & CUTTING EDGE TECH, 1st so they can be faster then the others and 2nd so they can have better features then the others.
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<div>with a good team behind it, it shoudnt be a problem.</div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Cutting edge releases (as opposed to just bug fix patches) are by<br>nature more buggy. If you're a developer, or a reviewer (or just
<br>what to play) then a distro that make it easy to get at the latest<br>and greatest would be a positive advantage. You don't mind helping<br>to find (and fix) the bugs.<br><br>But what is such a distro doing in a survey of Web Hosting
<br>Distribution Share? Surely here stability and reliability are the<br>watch words? Surely everyone is looking for a platform that will<br>offer them the most reliability on a system that they are buying<br>to be very public facing?
<br><br>Apparently not. There is a market for distros that offer other<br>advantages. Is FLOSS, by providing an environment were cost<br>is not a factor to the capabilities a system offers, showing that<br>the market place is a far more complex and that there are a
<br>significant number of players that are prepared to do things<br>differently - to buck the trend? I think so.<br><br>How does Red Hat see the competition? Sure it has three times<br>the share of it's closest commercial rival. But it is Debian
<br>that is kicking at Red Hat's heals. How does SuSE get a bigger<br>slice of the market when the two distros in front of it are free?</blockquote>
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<div>Is SuSE's aim to be the largest website host though, or is the aim to be a desktop?</div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">So what do the Debian and Fedora placements represent? Are there<br>organisations that want a web server but don't want to (or can't
<br>afford to) spend the extra money on support? How many of those<br>systems represent organisations that don't think that the services<br>offered by RH, SuSE, and the like are worth the price charged?<br><br>The survey points out that the fastest growing distros are
<br>the non-commercial ones. Are the big wigs at Red Hat, Novell,<br>etc worried by this? Or is it that the web hosting market is<br>bigger if entry costs can be kept to a minimum? Are the real<br>winners in the Linux community not Red Hat and SuSE, but
<br>hardware companies like Rackspace, 1&1 or Affinity? Are Dell,<br>Compact and other PC retailers missing sales by not offering<br>a package that comes with an non-commercial OS but with no<br>backup for the software?
<br><br>Steve<br><br>[1]<br><a href="http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html">http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html</a><br><br><br>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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