> I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has... In the 10-15 year time frame: IBM can't. Simple as that. In the 3-10

> I don't see how RH customers can become a captive revenue stream like mainframe has... In the 10-15 year time frame: IBM can't. Simple as that. In the 3-10 year time frame however, which not coincidentally happens to be in the range of CEO tenures, the momentum of enterprise infrastructure relying upon a specific platform delivers a kind of lock-in that absolutely can be exploited by IBM leadership. Look at Oracle. There are still quite a few use cases where their arguably painful pricing, licensing, and account relationship management experience are worth it. For some use cases, there is no other acceptable solution; I've seen them, and Oracle is damn impressive if you operate at that rarefied strata. But for arguably in the Pareto distribution of scenarios where Oracle is used, much of it like CRUD applications, Postgres does just fine. Yet Oracle today is as dominant as ever in many enterprises. When it comes to what can and cannot become captive revenue streams in the software market, I've learned to accept that the market can often be irrational for far longer than I can remain solvent. I really like Debian. It is what I use in my personal servers. I'd like nothing better than to see it supplant Red Hat. But in the enterprise, the Debian story is under-developed. Debian is very rarely supported by application vendors. The LTS duration is half that of Red Hat. The members of the big, profitable enterprise market move that slowly. I think those are tough problems to solve by someone like Ubuntu basing off a Debian distro to solve on their own. All the other challenges of interfacing with enterprise customers, communicating in their lingo, meeting them half-way, *etc., are addressable by a company organized around doing that using Debian, but there are inevitable questions of resolving differences of opinion in the future between the community and the company. I suspect Red Hat being both the distro and the commercial entity traded solving a lot of those types of problems with a different, more commercially-acceptable set of problems.