NewsFactor, Is There a Place for Debian in the Enterprise?:

Despite the hurdles facing it, there are scenarios in which Debian could succeed in the enterprise, [Open Source Development Lab principal analyst Stacey] Quandt said.

“In an enterprise environment where you have many custom applications and there is a willingness to use Debian — which does require technical expertise — it could become further adopted,” she said.

For example, Debian could be used as an OS for client desktops, “where you have user-defined workloads with a company using their own custom applications,” Quandt suggested.

“It really depends on the requirements of the end user,” she said. “If they are [technically] self supporting, and they don’t want to pay Red Hat for service and support, they could deploy Debian — and it would lead to greater return on investment.”

Very good points. But Gordon Haff of Illuminata makes very good points as well:

Because Debian is not maintained by a company, it does not have the support staff of larger Linux vendors. Lack of support is a critical problem for any distribution attempting to gain enterprise customers, analysts note.

“To have a company suggest that they can can bring all their Linux support and upgrades in-house — I question the cost effectiveness of that,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.

“If you look at the big trends in the I.T. industry, it’s about specializing and outsourcing,” Haff told NewsFactor. “We’ve really moved past the point where it makes sense for 99 percent of companies to have a director of kernel engineering in-house.

“Debian or other freer, less-supported distributions essentially require a company to say, ‘We can do Linux support and Linux engineering more cost-effectively than Red Hat,'” he said. “What’s next? Build your own computers?”

Precisely. And it is this observation that is the foundation of Progeny’s business model. The IT industry wants to break the chains of single-vendor reliance and proprietary lock-in, whether the lock-in is based on proprietary technology or some clever new scheme. But is the only way to break these chains to bring everything in-house?

Actually, no. Progeny provides a third option: We’re an outsource provider of Linux distribution maintenance that allows companies to essentially have their own Linux distributions, with a feature set, roadmap, and support model tailored to their needs rather than the vendor’s, all without having to bring the distribution management function in-house.

It’s a non-intuitive business model for an OS company, at least at first, because we’re so used to being at the whims of our vendors. We’re so used to it that the same model has carried forward from the proprietary OS world to the Linux distribution world. Now that Red Hat is turning the screws on the thumbs that have been so carefully positioned over the last several years, people are starting to realize they moved to open-source operating systems precisely to get away from this kind of screw-turning.

And now, a Cluetrain-inspired question:

Progeny’s primary focus is on building distributions for what we like to call “Linux-powered products”, products that are Linux-based but where Linux is just one layer of the overall stack, and possibly an invisible one at that. Lately, though, we’ve had a lot of folks ask if we might consider applying our customer- rather than vendor-centric approach to Linux to the more general-purpose deployment/enterprise space. Could we provide support for enterprise Debian deployments? Could we keep the updates coming for Red Hat 7.x after they are end-of-lifed at the end of the year?

So, market, would this be interesting to you? Talk to me, good, bad or indifferent.