Is open source software, like ubuntu, ready for large enterprise?
For example, IBM and HP are both deeply committed to Linux, with Sun Microsystems hedging somewhat, as they often do with technologies that they didn’t invent. Innumerable Web sites are built on Linux servers – usually running Apache – and I believe Amazon runs on Linux servers; Google definitely does. I don’t know which distros are used by these large organizations, but the conservative approach usually leads to selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise because these are fully vendor-supported and appear to be commercial products so they don’t make the suits nervous, not because they are of inherently higher quality than popular distros like Ubuntu and Fedora Core. One might also ask “Is closed source software, like Microsoft Windows, ready for large enterprise?” to which I would answer “barely.” There certainly are some rock-solid, case-hardened, close-source operating systems, like OpenVMS and most commercial flavors of Unix (except for Solaris, which was recently
