> On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 12:04:31PM +0000, bruce wrote: > > I did a first pass at the UserLinux white paper, it's at > > http://userlinux.org/white_paper.html. I think I'll sleep for a while.
This is an interesting white paper, but I think it's missing something rather important in its discussion of the business model. And I say this as I currently sit at a customer site in Atlanta working a critical situation, while wearing a suit (but not a tie, so the flow of blood to the brain has not been impeded :-). The important thing to remember here is that customers don't buy operating systems, they purchase solutions. And at the moment, many of the solutions require the use of proprietary third party applications: applications like SAP, or Oracle Financies, or Ariba. The next logical question then is why will an ISV support a particular distribution or OS provider? The answer in practice is that they will only support an OS/Distribution when they are reasonably certain that when they need help fixing some problem, they can get help from the distribution. Very often, in these situations, the ISV doesn't necessarily pay money to the OS/Distribution provider. In some cases, where the ISV is highly desired by the customers, the OS/Distribution provider actually has to **pay** **money** to the ISV, and establish a competency center in Waldorf, Germany staffed with some number of engineers before said ISV will actually deign to port their application to that particular OS and support that particular OS. These sorts of situations really do happen! Even in situations where the ISV is so highly desired that it would be a severe competitive disadvantage for a particular OS vendor of that particular enterprise resource planning application was not available on that OS, in many cases the ISV's can at the very minimum require that the OS vendor to provide free support. I recently visited one ISV where at their height of popularity, IBM had a team of three or four people devoted towards keeping that ISV happy, and this was necessary in order assure that the ISV would continue to support AIX. This particular ISV drove enough business in hardware, software, and professional services sales to IBM that it was worth IBM's while to devote a team of people for that particular ISV (and this ISV was not even one of the most highly strategic ISV's --- some ISV's might have an order of magnitude more people!). If some vendor such as Sequent had chosen not to devote that kind of support to that particular ISV, that particular vendor might have chosen not support PTX, and then Sequent would get locked out of certain customers that might have chosen to use this particular financial application. (I use Sequent here only because I didn't want to use the name of a currently active company; but the example applies just as equally to SGI/Irix or HP/HPUX or Sun/Solaris.) So the problem then with the UserLinux distribution concept is how do you fund required investments which are necessary for that particular distribution to succeed? $1 million USD might pay for the necessary engineering costs, but it will not pay for the ISV engagement resources necessary to provide free hand-holding support to ISV's that are used to getting that kind of support, and who are used to companies coming to them on bended knee in order to convince that ISV to port their application to Soliars, to AIX, to HPUX. But if one of the goals is to get an endorsement from application vendors, UserLinux will have to provide a comperable level of support as what Sun might give that particular ISV in order to support Solaris, for example. However, if you have multiple competing "body shops" that are making a small-but-manageable amount of profit to provide end-user customer support, how do you fund the freebie support to the ISV's? (And even worse, what about the some of the more strategic, more desireable ISV's that in some cases require free hardware or even seven figure cash payments before they will entertain supporting UserLinux?) It's an interesting problem.... but understanding some of these constraints might allow folks to understand why the commercial Linux distributions charge so much for their enterprise Linux products. - Ted