[Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]
Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.
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.
What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?
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.
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.
That's a massive, show-stopping problem.
How so?
I agree that it's a nontrivial problem to learn a piece of complex software from scratch to the point that you can offer comprehensive enterprise support for it, but how is that show-stopping?
I'm not sure what the cause is. If it's a fundamental technological problem, then it's insurmountable, but if it's just a documentation problem, then it might be fixable. It doesn't look good though, since, like I said, the whole stack has existed for a long time. You would think that something would've been done about it.
All that said, perhaps I'm just dumb. I'll be happy to see someone prove me wrong and succeed with that combo. The underlying technology is certainly interesting and powerful. But I won't be trying it.
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283
Besides the kernel contributions, Google has a long list of open source projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured
For all the hates Google gets on HN, they have been at the forefront of supporting OSS.
This list is not nearly exhaustive, but my main point is Google is hardly the outlier here.
Good on all the developers pushing for open source so much. The industry is in a much better place than it was 25 years ago.
What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?