A recent talk I led about community Linux and Ubuntu in the enterprise at LinuxWorld generated some discussion over at Slashdot. I can’t say that I completely agree with the headline, ‘Paid support not critical for Linux adoption.’ Well, not critical to some adoption. If we’re talking about the enterprise, and particularly if we’re talking large enterprise, paid support is absolutely, positively critical to use of Linux. In addition, we believe it is actually commercial support or ‘paid support’ — not for RHEL or SUSE but for CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu — that is helping to drive community Linux in the enterprise. The point of our report is to offer a sense of what increased adoption of non-paid Linux, which we do see in the enterprise and even in the large enterprise, means for those commercial Linux subscriptions and vendors, as well as for partners and users.

What we found is that it can work both ways. Community Linux can very often serve as entry into the open source OS and lead to broader, more advanced use all the way up to commercial subscriptions. At the same time, community Linux versions (that is, for our purposes, a community-developed, freely available Linux operating systems for the server) also present an appealing option to commercial Linux. It can be a particularly good option when the code is identical and perhaps more flexible, as is the case with CentOS for Red Hat, or when the Linux distribution is getting easier to use and support, as is the case with Ubuntu, and when hardware providers and other players are offering commercial support for it, as is the case with Debian, which is supported by HP on the company’s hardware.

As usual, our report is being viewed by some as a contention that free, unpaid community Linux distributions, which only the true geeks use, will be washing into datacenters and displacing Red Hat and Novell SUSE. That’s not actually how we see it. In true open source fashion, the successful community distributions are slowly and quietly creeping into enterprise use, first on file and print servers or divisional and developmental use, but even for more mission-critical computing. Before too long, we’ll see some of these community distros gaining more commercial backing and support options from hardware vendors, SIs, VARs and others.

So what does it mean for Red Hat and Novell? More of the same, probably, marked by greater emphasis on the cutting edge features and functionality that they provide in their Linux software and subscriptions — their differentiation to unpaid, unsupported Linux. When it comes to virtualization, deployment of or in the cloud, Red Hat and SUSE Linux are further along than the others. There is still lots of room for the commercial vendors to differentiate and justify their paid subscriptions for Linux, and for the vast majority of large IT organization, the ‌’insurance’ and accountability of a contract is still paramount.

Nevertheless, the impact of community Linux on the commercial market will grow along with use of these ‘other’ Linux distributions. We are also seeing community Linux, particularly Ubuntu, as the basis for newer models, including virtual appliances. Customers will benefit not only from the additional options, competition and its impact on pricing and support, they are also likely to grow more self-sufficient as they leverage more Linux.