“A standard would free vendors from duplicated effort and
incompatibility problems.”
“Even though Mandrake boasts that its Linux distribution is the
hottest in retail sales, the company considers its retail product a
loss leader. SuSE laid off two-thirds of its US employees.
TurboLinux is cutting back on its work force and may soon wed
Linuxcare in order to refocus its efforts on services. Stormix, a
Debian-based commercial distributor, recently filed for bankruptcy.
Corel is getting nowhere with its Linux distribution. In other
words, most Linux distributions — even the ones with growing
market shares — are coming to the conclusion that they can’t make
their money selling Linux.”
“Welcome to the reality of selling a free operating system.”
“There are a number of reasons why Linux distributions are dying
or shrinking and, I predict, will soon consolidate. The first and
foremost is that most Linux distributors continue to base their
added value on things like ease of installation or additional
packages on the CD.”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.
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