Re:Red Hat internationally (Score 2, Informative)

I would tend to disagree with some parts of Dave's opinion.

While it is true that Red Hat is the dominant distributor worldwide(I run Fc2),many other distributors arent sleeping.

Mandrake is doing very well,many of my peers in colleges and in corporates have now begin to evaluate Mandrake as well as Suse before taking a call on what to purchase.

Suse has a lot going for it.The support from Novell is one of the best things to happen to os/fs in a long time.Novell is also hiring aggresively(not in terms of number of ppl but in quality of ppl) for its Bangalore(India based) center primarily for its open source initiative.

The best way to increase market shares as we all know is to sign up long term deals with major OEM's like HP,Compaq and Dell.While some of the distributions have achived success in this,a lot still needs to be done.

In developing countries like India and China that have huge markets but major major piracy problems,getting users to use Linux instead of a pirated windows is going to be the key.Most home users understand that piracy is bad but continue using it because the OS is just too expensive. How linux distributors approach these ppl is going to be crucial in deciding future growth rates