* Is Red Hat's Fedora non-commercial?
Many readers commented on last week’s report of a study by Evans Data, which said that in a poll of Linux developers, more coders who use Linux prefer to use non-commercial, or pre-packaged distributions of Linux, as opposed to shrink-wrapped Linux distributions from such vendors as Red Hat or SuSE. Of the 419 developers the research firm polled, 34% said they preferred to roll their own Linux, whereas 28% liked commercial Linux better.
Some readers questioned the premise of the survey, bringing up the fact that “commercial” and “non-commercial” Linux is a gray area.
“Is Fedora non-commercial because you don’t have to pay for it, or is it commercial because it’s produced by paid employees?” said one reader, referring to Red Hat’s free version of Linux, as opposed to the vendor’s subscription-based offering. “I wonder how many of the people who said that they use non-commercial distributions use Fedora?”
Another reader said the survey itself, or the report on it, was lacking.
“What good is a poll/survey if you can’t give us [percent] of error? If you don’t know, you can’t really compare with other years.” The margin of error, by the way, was 5%, according to Evans Data.
Another reader sided with the plurality. Speaking of a recent experience with a commercial Linux distribution, the reader said the frustrating part was tweaking and tuning all of the packages the distributor threw into the product.
“At one point in the past I had to install 214M bytes of KDE binaries and libraries just to upgrade the kernel even though my system never had KDE on it (I use Gnome). During the installation process I de-selected postfix and had to hunt through three sublevels to find Sendmail to install as [a mail transfer agent]. The same thing happened with the ftp server. Security and bug fixes are far, far slower than using a source-based distro (I use Gentoo).
“Once you go to the ‘source’ you can never go back.”
