David Palmer. wrote:
In the open source/free software environment, marketing aspects are rarely considered, and traditionally not looked on favourably. But if that viewpoint drives M$ into the dirt before their touted Longhorn/Linux offering, I'm all for it. Marketing concepts maximise profit. There are many definitions of profit. Favourable marketing concepts, within the enterprise environment are, stability, which we have, security, which we now have again, speed must also be achieved in order to further cast those that would appear to be competition, in the eye of the target market, into the shade by comparison.
As a sysadmin myself, I would like to add some concepts to your list : - compatibilityIt is important to offer compatibility with widely used proprietary applications that cannot be integrated into debian. If the vendor do not provide support (officially or not) for integration into debian, debian cannot considered as the system of choice. we can achieve it ourselves, however, by providing scripts which help integrate such software. Contrib is important also : as an exemple, php provide compatibility with Oracle, but to integrate this in debian one need to recompile php4 package. Then it will be more difficult to upgrade, etc. It may be not possible to provide such packages due to licence issues, but we need documentation or scripts to help the process. Continuing with my example, I could not find documentation on how to add a "php4-oracle" package with php4 source package.
- Ease of maintenancethe first reason why enterprise switch to debian instead of, let's say, defora or SuSE, is the long life cycle and the ease of upgrade between release. We already have that :) but a distributed maintenance interface (something like redhat network) would be nice.
It seems to me that these concepts are key ones to convince an enterprise (or, at least, the thechies of that enterprise) to switch to a distribution over another one.
Regards, -- Clément "nodens" Hermann <clement.hermann@free.fr> - L'air pur ? C'est pas en RL, ça ? c'est pas hors charte ? -- Jean in l'Histoire des Pingouins - http://tnemeth.free.fr/fmbl/linuxsf --