Commercial Linux Distributions

Commercial Linux Distributions

Popular linux distributions

     Linux isn’t a complete operating system — it’s just a kernel. Linux distributions take the Linux kernel and combine it with other free software to create complete packages. There are many different Linux distributions out there.If you want to “install Linux,” you’ll need to choose a distribution. You could also use Linux From Scratch to compile and assemble your own Linux system from the ground up that is a lot of work to do.

     Though there are distributions available in market for free, setting up servers and maintaining them is not an easy job. You ought to have sound knowledge of operating system you are using and the underlying architecture. Moreover as Linux distributions are developed by community there is no one in particular who can be held responsible for fixing bugs or providing security patches. Here comes the commercial distributions into picture. These provide support, security patches as a service to the available open-source softwares.

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with satellite offices worldwide.

Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux and with the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat also offers Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, and consulting services.

Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired several proprietary software product codebases through corporate mergers and acquisitions and has released such software under open source licenses. As of March 2016, Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel version 4.5 after Intel

SUSE

SUSE is built on top of the open source Linux kernel and is distributed with system and application software from other open source projects. SUSE Linux is of German origin, basically an acronym of “Software und System-Entwicklung” (software and systems development), and was mainly developed in Europe.