Hi

I noticed a trend of paid for distros and then failed or go unactive. I remember lycoris, Xandros and Linspire go under. Does anyone know why they failed?

Red Hat's doing fine.

2 members found this post helpful.

I would assume that the fact free distros which have the same functionality exist is a pretty good candidate.
To get people to pay fro a distro you would have to give something to add value and that is tough to do.

Thanks snowpine and 273 for replying.

I'm not sure but I think Xandros and Linspire made deals with microsoft to include some of their technologies into the distro. But, don't quote me on that.

Microsoft doe shave a tendency to send lawyers to extract money from anyone it thinks can't afford to fight it in court. So, yes, that may have something to do with it since MS insists that Linux is using technology it has patented and there aren't many companies out there able to spend enough to go to court with MS.
This, incidentally, is one reason I will not pay MS a penny -- anything you pay them can and will be used to prevent people from providing good software.

From what I have read on these forums (no personal experience) Xandros and Linspire failed because a) they didn't provide long-term/follow-up support once their "parent" distro reached end-of-life; b) they kind of sucked.

That may seem harsh, but search for past threads on Xandros and Linpus, and you will read the words of some seriously frustrated users; total nightmare!

I have to admit I was in a hurry to replace the Xandros on this EEE with something else.

Xandros looked like a fisher price OS on that EEE

I replaced mine with debian with help from forums

I assume that each commercial attempt other than Suse and Red Hat failed because of a few things. The target audience is the most important. The small guys couldn't supply drivers and apps the market wanted. Second to that is the hardware support. It is almost impossible to support generic stuff.

One might even suggest once mighty distro's like Solaris is in trouble. While there is really no need for flash player in a server OS, it seems that to get people interested, you need to let them play first.

Slackware is very much a commercial, paid-for distribution. It's doing fine.

I heard they hit the billion-dollar-mark recently. Sounds like "doing fine" is an understatement

And hey, gotta show SUSE Enterprise a bit of love, too. They're hanging in there.

But yeah, the paid-for model hasn't failed at all, especially in the enterprise realm. While small organizations are generally comfortable with self-support if it means saving some money, medium and large business - especially those using Linux in mission-critical environments - are generally more receptive to a product like RHEL or SUSE that includes professional support in case something goes wrong. Of course, there are exceptions (namely, Wikipedia, as well as Google if I remember right), but the paid supporters are still making money.

I know Canonical follows this model indirectly by offering the distro for free and allowing users to tack on paid support as they see fit. I can't say they've been the most successful at this, but they haven't gone down yet. They're also a bit newer to the paid-support game than much of the competition, so there's that to consider as well.

Yeah, I don't have high hopes for Solaris, either, though I'm sure it'll still do well preinstalled on Sun/Oracle SPARC boxen.

-whoops-

the distros you list tried to compete with the likes of Apple, Dell, HP, etc... and just could not do it. Apple has its own marketing campaign that pays for its hardware, etc... Dell, HP, and other Microsoft OEM's get PAID by Microsoft to support their OS and to a large extent their OS only.

With that in mind it is impossible, or nearly so, for a small company to compete with the deep pockets of Microsoft, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony, etc... especially when those distros were horrid to say the least. Very buggy, ugly GUI, clunky, and just never really worked. See above for more info. Google for their other issues as well.

Companies like Novell and RedHat are very successful at selling their SERVICE, not their OS/distro. It is illegal for them to charge money for the CODE of their distro, it is NOT however illegal for them to charge for service. Their SLA's are fantastic as are their local and field engineers.

The same CAN NOT be said about Microsoft. Have you ever really met a FANTASTIC Microsoft MCSE? Ive meet some good ones and a few who were even great, but those all came from the Novell world and converted over to Microsoft AFTER Novell started losing server ground to the likes of Win2k server and new vs that were able to network roughly as well as the then Novell Network Manager servers could on top of the older NT4 networks.

Again remember it is illegal according to the licenses that surround the Linux kernel and many of its modules to CHARGE for the CODE. It is NOT illegal to charge for services to include, but not limited to customer support, custom 3rd party drivers, backwards compatibility testing and compliance, etc...

Heck if Canonical would remove its malware and move to a subscription fee i think it would do rather well IF and ONLY IF they had real 24/7 phone support akin to Apple's phone support. As it stands with their malware in place and their complete refusal to remove it or at least make it an opt-in, ill never support them just like i refuse to support Microsoft.

Mostly it comes down to support I think. I believe people WILL pay for an open source OS, but you have to provide the kind of support we've seen from Red Hat or Suse. Your desktop users have a different desire. They want to be able to watch movies, listen to music, watch their online videos, etc. You need to offer an "out of the box" implementation that simply WORKS, and you need to make sure that it will work with just about ANY hardware correctly. Those for-pay distros that have tried to market a desktop-oriented distribution simply have failed to provide that. It would be DOUBLY hard to start one now, what with many OS's now offering a nearly flawless functionality with little to no real work.

Also, the main selling point of SUSE used to actually be the printed documentation. I don't know if that's still true.