On 16/10/2018 19:21, Japheth Cleaver wrote: > I'm not sure that that necessarily follows. Among RH-ecosystem > distributions, and specifically RHEL derivatives, there's a barrier to > the usefulness of smaller projects given that a large chunk of the > users need binary-compatible commercial equivalents, or at least > vaguely commercially supported ecosystems. We're long past the days > where WBEL and other hobbyist projects can probably gain traction. > Those RHEL alternatives that do exist either have a long history > (CentOS, even before the RH deal), or are supported by large entities: > the government (SL, before it became more or less congruent with > CentOS), a multi billion dollar company (OEL), or a trillion dollar > company (AWS). SuSE Enterprise might be the best counter example here. > > Also, while EL6 did move from original init to upstart, that's > somewhat beside the point. Almost none of the advanced features from > upstart were used, and - crucially - the startup sequence was still > handled with grokkable, imperative scripts. The jump from EL6->EL7 was > night and day compared to EL5->EL6. Not that I disagree with the thrust of what you are saying but it seems to me that SUSE is not so much a counter example. The SUSE subsidiary of Micro Focus is, in and of itself, a multi-billion dollar company. It was valued at $2.535 billion when its sale to EQT Partners was agreed earlier this year. It seems to me that what you say in your first paragraph above applies not just to RH-ecosystem Linuxes but probably to all corporate-focussed ones in both the RH and SUSE ecosystems. It's mainly the Debian world where it seems to me that there is still room for smaller entrants (including at least one healthy non-systemd one). -- Mark Rousell