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.

>only problem is hardly anyone knows how to use it.

That's a massive, show-stopping problem.

> 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?

No, I mean NixOS/NixOPS being incomprehensible to a large amount of us even after several years of existing. That's a huge problem, and it's their problem.

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.