The first guy I ran into was Russell Beattie at the WaveMarket booth, ideally situated just inside the door to the pavilion. I had been highly impressed by the company demo earlier, which showed a remarkable combination of blogging, mapping and cellular telephony. Here’s a sample from the recorded conversation that followed:
[…]
At first we were using Red Hat 8 and were having problems compiling a mod plugin for Apache (which meant) we couldn’t run Tomcat, which is our Java application server. We didn’t want to go with Red Hat 9 because it was at end of life. One of the guys in the office kept saying “Debian is the way to go”, and that’s the way we went.
I think Debian’s becoming the only solution. I don’t know if I trust Fedora yet because I don’t know if there’s a community around it or if it’s going to gather the momentum. There’s a perfect community behind Debian. It’s so great. I had a problem with a compiler, wrote about it on my blog, and somebody just e-mailed me this morning and said “I read about your compiling problem, and here’s how to do it.”
Next stop was Oddpost, where they began enthusing about Debian as soon as they saw me. […]
Two things blew my mind downstairs there at Demo. One was that so many of these hot new products and services were deployed on Linux as a matter of course; the operating system choice was hardly open to question. The other is that Debian is clearly emerging as a primary choice, even for somewhat embedded products.
In fact, Netcraft’s latest numbers bear that out as well: Red Hat is still the leading distribution (at least in terms of presence in Apache headers), but Debian is gaining rapidly, with a growth rate of 24.6%.
Want to know how to make money with Linux? Grab the free stuff and build something on it that makes money. These guys at Demo demonstrated the model beautifully.