Friday, January 16, 2004
Who's Patching Open Source ?
An interesting 2 part article states that -
The first place many companies look for Apache support is their main distribution provider, most commonly Red Hat or SuSE. As open source grows, the need for support grows, and this new need has led to the development of a new support option: third-party vendors who manage or patch software.
Part 1 of this two-part series addresses the special challenges inherent in fixing problems as they arise in open-source software. Part 2 takes a look at some potential solutions.
When Red Hat decided to stop supporting certain earlier versions of its Linux software, it instantly created a new market: a third-party source for Red Hat 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 patches. Customers who once received patches for those distributions from Red Hat are -- potentially -- a lucrative market for another vendor.
Filling that need, as of January 1st, is Progeny, an Indiana-based company that specializes in custom-built Linux applications.
As for why Red Hat itself is not providing the patches, Progeny president Garth Dickey noted that Red Hat has shifted to an "up-market strategy," focused only on enterprise accounts. Its earlier versions no longer fit into that plan.
Is providing third-party patches for open source profitable? Of the many Red Hat users, "I don't think anyone's ever asked how much of that is licensed Red Hat and how much of it is free Red Hat," Dickey noted.
Many users of free Red Hat may never have paid much for support at any point, Open Source Development Lab analyst Stacey Quandt told NewsFactor. "So it will be interesting to see if [Progeny] is able to scale that model to get users to pay support dollars for that."
This concept may not be appealing to open-source developers, Quandt noted, but Covalent's target audience is end-user companies, not developers. "People look to the best solution to solve the problem," she said, "so it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not going to look at proprietary applications."
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/16/2004 06:35:00 AM
