{"id":2435,"date":"2010-07-30T06:05:52","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T20:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=2435"},"modified":"2018-12-11T18:34:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T08:34:49","slug":"whats-the-point-of-enterprise-commercial-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2010\/07\/30\/whats-the-point-of-enterprise-commercial-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s the point of enterprise, commercial Linux?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m curious as to the differences between using a commercial, supported version of Linux in the enterprise and a non-supported one. Now, I know all the regular arguments &#8211; they&#8217;re implicitly stated in my article about <a title=\"The Perils of Icarus Support Contracts\" href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2010\/03\/17\/the-perils-of-an-icarus-support-contract\/\" target=\"_blank\">Icarus Support Contracts<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s the beef: I&#8217;m not convinced that commercial Linux companies really offer a safety net. Or to put it another way &#8211; they may offer the net, but I&#8217;m yet to see much evidence that it&#8217;s actually secured to anything. It almost seems a bit like the emperor&#8217;s new clothes, and I believe we&#8217;re seeing a real surge in popularity of distributions such as CentOS for precisely this reason.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the sorts of things I&#8217;ve commonly seem from customers with commercial enterprise Linux distributions who say, log support cases with the Linux distributor:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Being advised to just simply apply the latest patches \u2013 OK, sometimes this is valid, but we all treat such recommendations with caution;<\/li>\n<li>Being advised to search Google forums, etc.;<\/li>\n<li>Being mired in finger pointing hell \u2013 it seems that most features or components a company will <em>want<\/em> to log a case over aren&#8217;t covered by the expensive support contracts that come with enterprise\/commercial Linux;<\/li>\n<li>Getting average and\/or highly complicated responses that don&#8217;t inspire confidence.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, I worry that commercial enterprise Linux distributions provide few tangible benefits over repackaged or alternate distributions.<\/p>\n<p>As proof that I&#8217;m serious about this subject, I&#8217;ll say something that years ago may have made me apoplectic: Even given how little I like Microsoft&#8217;s products, my honest observation is that companies with Microsoft support contracts get substantially more benefit at substantially lower cost than those who have similar support contracts with the enterprise commercial Linux vendors.<\/p>\n<p>So, I&#8217;m asking people to convince me I&#8217;m wrong \u2013 or at least provide counter-arguments! If you&#8217;re using a commercial, enterprise Linux, please help me understand what value you get out of their support programmes \u2013 examples of problems they&#8217;ve solved, and how they&#8217;ve proved themselves equal to (or better than) support offerings from either Microsoft or other Unix providers. Any examples\/stories that touch on data backup\/recovery or storage would be of particular interest.<\/p>\n<p>So feel free to add a comment and let me know what you think!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m curious as to the differences between using a commercial, supported version of Linux in the enterprise and a non-supported&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,23],"tags":[1248,698,1256],"class_list":["post-2435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-support","tag-linux","tag-open-source","tag-support"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-Dh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7547,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions\/7547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}