[Sussex] A funny thing happened on the way to the Net

[Steve Dobson]

Morning All

First thanks to Nik for arranging last night.

In this morning's surfing I read an article [1] that puts Debian
a strong second and Fedora third as the Linux distros used on
Web Hosting systems.  Red Hat was first - no surprise there.
But isn't it nice to see that Debian, a community run project
with no company behind it, placed so highly?

What surprised me the most was Gentoo's showing.  Now before you hit
the reply button and cause me to put on my asbestos suit (please
don't, it's just back from the cleaners after having the last set
of burn marks removed) I'm not getting at Gentoo.  Gentoo is
a distro that I think as targeted at developers, or people who
want access to (or close to) the cutting edge.

Cutting edge releases (as opposed to just bug fix patches) are by
nature more buggy.  If you're a developer, or a reviewer (or just
what to play) then a distro that make it easy to get at the latest
and greatest would be a positive advantage.  You don't mind helping
to find (and fix) the bugs.

But what is such a distro doing in a survey of Web Hosting 
Distribution Share?  Surely here stability and reliability are the
watch words?  Surely everyone is looking for a platform that will
offer them the most reliability on a system that they are buying
to be very public facing?

Apparently not.  There is a market for distros that offer other
advantages.  Is FLOSS, by providing an environment were cost
is not a factor to the capabilities a system offers, showing that
the market place is a far more complex and that there are a 
significant number of players that are prepared to do things 
differently - to buck the trend?  I think so.

How does Red Hat see the competition?  Sure it has three times
the share of it's closest commercial rival.  But it is Debian
that is kicking at Red Hat's heals.  How does SuSE get a bigger
slice of the market when the two distros in front of it are free?

So what do the Debian and Fedora placements represent?  Are there 
organisations that want a web server but don't want to (or can't
afford to) spend the extra money on support?  How many of those
systems represent organisations that don't think that the services
offered by RH, SuSE, and the like are worth the price charged?

The survey points out that the fastest growing distros are
the non-commercial ones.  Are the big wigs at Red Hat, Novell,
etc worried by this?  Or is it that the web hosting market is
bigger if entry costs can be kept to a minimum?  Are the real
winners in the Linux community not Red Hat and SuSE, but
hardware companies like Rackspace, 1&1 or Affinity?  Are Dell,
Compact and other PC retailers missing sales by not offering
a package that comes with an non-commercial OS but with no
backup for the software?

Steve

[1]
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html
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