Hehe - where is the business model of Colgate? Everybody can produce toothpaste, make commercials and sell it. Everybody can make Cola, make commercials and sell it. But for some stupid reason, Coca Cola and Colgate seem to do well.
Holger Dyroff is complaining that the Linux business is a competitive market. But he forgets, that people will always put their money somewhere, and right now, SuSE is the biggest Linux distribution in the World according to some estimates (Red Hat according to other estimates).
The biggest threat to SuSe comes from the Debian distribution. It's completely non-commercial and has a lot of interesting aspects. I don't see it as fit for commercial use now, but as years go by, the difference between Red Hat, SuSE and Debian will probably decline and Debian will take market share.
If you think of it, Red Hat and SuSE can render irrelevant. If both companies stopped tomorrow, Debian would increase fast in User Share, and other companies would take over there Red Hat and SuSE left. Debian already today has features that Red Hat and SuSE users dream about. But I'm sure, as years go by, SuSE and Red Hat will either turn into profitable companies with a great margin, or they will be bought by bigger companies like Intel, IBM, Sun or HP/Compaq.
The glue, that would make the distributions continue to get more and more alike, is the same glue as always: The ability of the distributions to run open-source software. Be compatible or die.
Lars. |
