Comment by techntoke
7 years ago
I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.
7 years ago
I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.
Except corporate users usually want support.
It does make me wonder though if it would ever be possible for a bunch of business savy open source developers could ever get around to creating an open source co-op. Something like the commercial version of the FSF. Build open source products with solid support contracts, and build/contribute to open source that way.
The organization would be owned by the very people building and contributing the code.
RedHat is the only company that I can see that really did everything in the open.
I'm not sure which one I feel worse about, Oracle buying Sun, or IBM buying RedHat? I feel that Oracle did some major missteps in their acquisition (for this I look squarely at OpenOffice, and their misshandling of it, although, the OOo community hated the Oracle acquisition from day one, which I guess might have made it a little like poison berries - no one would want to go near it).
Oracle completely ruined MySQL during the acquisition too.
> Except corporate users usually want support.
What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?
Corporate users can barely get around to patching windows desktops and are happy with Redhat being so slow moving, they're not going to jump on the arch constant upgrade cycle anytime soon.
It is not ideal for managing servers without better supporting documentation, but engineering efforts would be pretty minimal to make it work well.
This so much.
What's it take to build an excellent Arch enterprise support team (because that's the only way I'd ever want to do it)?
Taking on the big ones on their own turf isn't going to work, I think. By that turf I mean supporting years old versions running in dusty custom data centers.
I'd suggest building an auto-upgrade system on top of Arch (or Alpine), and go for immutable infrastructure as the selling point. That's stepping on CoreOS's toes a bit, but I haven't seen any progress from that crowd ever since Red Hat bought them, so it'll probably get even worse now.
That way you can target AWS/Azure/$OTHER_MODERN_STUFF in a more focused way, and you won't be stuck on supporting months/years old versions of the OS.
> I'd suggest building an auto-upgrade system on top of Arch (or Alpine), and go for immutable infrastructure as the selling point. That's stepping on CoreOS's toes a bit, but I haven't seen any progress from that crowd ever since Red Hat bought them, so it'll probably get even worse now.
In that case, why not go all the way over to NixOS? They already have a more or less complete cloud stack with NixOps, the only problem is hardly anyone knows how to use it.
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