Even though Mandrake boasts that its Linux distribution is the hottest in retail sales, the company considers its retail product a loss leader. SuSE laid off two-thirds of its US employees. TurboLinux is cutting back on its work force and may soon wed Linuxcare in order to refocus its efforts on services. Stormix, a Debian-based commercial distributor, recently filed for bankruptcy. Corel is getting nowhere with its Linux distribution. In other words, most Linux distributions -- even the ones with growing market shares -- are coming to the conclusion that they can't make their money selling Linux.

Welcome to the reality of selling a free operating system.

There are a number of reasons why Linux distributions are dying or shrinking and, I predict, will soon consolidate. The first and foremost is that most Linux distributors continue to base their added value on things like ease of installation or additional packages on the CD.

Once upon a time those were among the primary selling points of a Linux distribution. But now that Linux is becoming widely adopted, the focus has changed. Businesses care less about ease of installation and more about whether their choice of Linux installs and runs at all on their hardware. In many cases they are simply buying server hardware with Linux preinstalled.

And when it comes to software packages, businesses care less about what comes on the CD-ROM and more about whether they can install software that is available via the Internet or from independent software vendors.

Ease of installation and added packages just don't cut it anymore. The biggest shame is that some distributions already have a lot of added value such as specialized software, training, and services to offer today's businesses. But vendors can't market those advantages properly because their base systems are incompatible with the de facto standard, Red Hat. If incompatibility weren't an issue, customers would have an easier time noticing distributions' value.

Installation frustration

The issue of installation in particular haunts almost all distributions except Red Hat, because Red Hat is the de facto standard. To some extent Mandrake is immune, because it is largely Red Hat-compatible. But users of other distributions are all-too-familiar with the problems of installing software from the Internet. Just because Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux, and others are, like Red Hat, RPM-based distributions doesn't mean you can expect to install any RPM-based software package without difficulty. You can't.

I've mentioned that problem a number of times in my columns, since it is one of my biggest pet peeves. When you install an RPM package, it doesn't check the software you actually have on your Linux system to see if the package meets dependencies. Instead, it checks the RPM database.

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