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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business.

I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

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There isn't (to my knowledge) a large enterprise-supported version of Debian like Red Hat / CentOS. You could argue Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is significantly different in focus to Debian, while Red Hat is almost identical to CentOS.

Debian also, unjustly, suffers from its non-corporate image/reputation.

Most of my professional sysadmin career has been spent managing RPM-based Linux distributions. The time I was asked to netboot and automatically configure multiple Ubuntu/Debian/Mint workstations, I found that there just wasn't the breadth of netboot/kickstart-type documentation available on Debian based systems. The smaller number of users doing that sort of thing led to less documentation. (I'm not saying that is definitively the case nowadays, it's just that lots of large scale deployments mean a lot of documentation and projects to support such activities)

The relationship between Debian and Ubuntu is more akin to that between fedora and RHEL.

Having a different focus than fedora, in fact, one could say almost radically different[1] hasn't stopped Redhat from contributing people, hardware and support to fedora -- leaving the volunteers to focus on contributions -- be it by code or as you point out documentation.

Help with 'administrative' or grunt-work tasks goes a long way in large OSS projects and Ubuntu/Cannonical simply haven't stepped up where they should have.

[1] for business vs for developers, cutting edge vs stability, ..etc

Red Hat have been pretty smart with the whole Fedora/RHEL/CentOS progression. You get to mess with cutting edge stuff in Fedora (and Fedora Silverlight), and then take what works to fold into RHEL. Then you rebuild RHEL into CentOS so people use the free and binary compatible version of your product, which leads them to use the supported/sold version in production.

Why not Canonical/Ubuntu ? After all they are presumably the most affected by the state of Debian. Just a couple of days ago I made a comment along these lines in a different thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19353816

  > While this is sad and painful to read, I can't say I'm surprised.
  > 
  > The problems listed are precisely the kind of problems that Redhat
  > strategically supports fedora with, in terms of investment of resources.
  > For all the hate Redhat receives it has consistently been a good
  > community member by being willing to help fedora in areas that it knows
  > are hard and yet not 'cool' enough to attract volunteer contributions.
  > 
  > What has Ubuntu done for the debian community along the same lines?

To further contrast this difference, here's what Redhat does for fedora and OSS in general:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

https://getfedora.org/sponsors

versus:

https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi

https://www.debian.org/partners/

https://www.debian.org/mirror/sponsors

Of course, that doesn't stop 'em from throwing in lip-service:

https://www.ubuntu.com/community/debian

https://www.canonical.com/projects

I would hope someone could set me straight if I'm wrong, but I thought that the relationship between Canonical and Debian was mostly one of taking rather than giving back?

You're right about Red Hat though, they get a lot of negative feeling from people who may not understand just how much they give back to the community at large.

I think it depends a lot on the relationship between the people who work on some party of the distribution. The canonical people are paid and have their todo list, and they are paid to do that. So if they have a good contact to Debian, they try to get things done via Debian. Some even don't care at all. Some are even Debian developer and do all teir work in Ubuntu and just upload something to Debian at some point. Or they try to force their init system into Debian.... So there are a lot of positive things, but when I think about the biggest issues we had in Debian (or actually have), I consider Ubuntu as evil.

Amazon has Amazon Linux which is based on CentOS, and Google has invested in CoreOS which also based on CentOS just for K8s. I don't know if other vendors like DO would invest in any specific distro tbh.

Additional data point: The Linux that runs Google corp Linux machines is a debian derivative:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux

CoreOS was based on ChromeOS/Gentoo. With the Red Hat acquisition of CoreOS, it will be merged with Atomic and based on Fedora/RHEL.

I think GKE's 'cos' is based on the ChromeOS/Gentoo version of CoreOS.

I'd hope not. An organization like the Wikimedia Foundation or Apache would be a better fit.

I agree... Debian's corporate independence is a feature not a bug.

I can't see why they would, they don't use internally (afaik). Even Amazon has it's own (centos derived) version of linux for instances.

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