distros and markets (was ubuntu for Internet cafe)

[Dave Hall]

On Mon, 2010-06-14 at 16:48 +1000, Basil Chupin wrote: 
> >>> On 14/06/10 16:34, Paul Gear wrote:
> >>> Deep Freeze is available for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop,
> >>> so it's likely that it could be hacked (possibly only with Faronics'
> >>> involvement) to work with Ubuntu:
> >>> http://www.faronics.com/en/Products/DeepFreeze/DeepFreezeLinux.aspx
> >>>
> 
> But I hardly think that SLED is something which "normal" users would 
> install where Deep Freeze would be needed. Novell claims that, in the 
> corporate world, they are second to Red Hat in popularity, but Ubuntu 
> outshines anyone of these (ie, or their derivatives) combined when it 
> comes to the "great unwashed", "let them eat cake", "punters".

If you were a proprietary software vendor with a product that was
clearly marketed at the bigger end of town, then ubuntu is unlikely to
be top of your "distros to support list".  It is still my experience
that large organisations using Linux generally opt for RHEL/SLE* rather
than ubuntu or debian.

Overall businesses which are willing to pay for RH/SUSE, are more likely
to fork out for other software too.  Many of the dual licensed and
proprietary business tools for Linux target these distros as that is
where the money is.

As an example how much software that you run under Linux (any distro)
have you paid money for?  In my case I only pay for Zend Studio as the
code refactoring tool pays for itself many times over in a year.  On the
other hand, I don't pay for Zimbra which I use and deploy for clients as
I can use FOSS tools to make the open source version as good as the
proprietary version.

There is more to business decisions than just market share of a distro.
Generally the "likely to pay market" is more important for proprietary
software vendors.

Cheers

Dave