Open source is profitable because professional services is profitable. Open source companies like jBilling, SugarCRM and the like make most of their revenue not from selling licenses, but all kind of services around the software they created that they know well. If you want to deploy jBilling in your company, who do you call? Well, the guys that wrote it would be a good choice.

Add to that companies like IBM, that make a lot of money on consulting and that type of services...

Oracle itself makes a good share of its revenue from support. Try to buy an oracle license without support, you will get called every other day by an Oracle salesman offering support. Try then to upgrade to a newer version of Oracle: you'll have to pay all the years of support you did not pay first.

So Oracle knows very well that software services is profitable, and open source is just a way to distribute software to maximize professional services revenue.

I use Ubuntu for my daily work, mainly because we install what we develop on Linux servers. It is just much easier to have on my desktop the same environment that I'll be facing with customers. I do not care a whole lot about performance, but I am very grateful that is so stable. A windows desktop would not compare.

Another thing I noticed with Vista, is that it keeps the hard drive light on at all times, no matter what I'm doing (or not doing). This can downgrade performance to almost unusable levels at times. With Ubuntu, it make more sense when the hard drive is accessed and the cache is clearly working well.

Having said that, it is funny to see that Ubuntu outperforms Mac in the categories that matter to me.

Cheers,

E. Conde
jBilling.com Open Source Billing

This could be pretty damaging to CentOS. I run an open source project... if the guy that started it and keeps it on course leaves, the project can suffer a lot.

I like CentOS, many of our customers prefer it as a free alternative to RedHat. I hope the lead of CentOS is fine.

Cheers,

E. Conde
Lead Developer
jBilling.com - Open Source Billing