With the situation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux many of our customers and partners have asked us what is our policy and commitment to our community as well as our business partners. But before we get into that we are revamping Xandros Enterprise Linux. From how the distribution is built, what is included and even some of our support tiers. We are going to start permitting customers and users of Xandros Community Edition to add those deployments to their support contracts. So by the fall we will have massive changes to the Xandros Enterprise Linux lineup.
But back to the Red Hat situation. Many of our customers and users have had questions and we are going to answer those questions and address some of their concerns.
1. What do you do with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
We resell RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on servers and workstations for customers who work within the Red Hat ecosystem. We resell RHEL 99.9% of the time as a vanilla install. The only modifications we do make for a customer is installing drivers that they need but that is only done for 2 customers. We do offer support for RHEL and we have about 20 customers who run RHEL. We used to make a CentOS/Fedora based distro for some of those customers but when Red Hat started giving out free releases of RHEL we ceased production of that distribution.
2. Our commitment to open source software and the open source software community.
We firmly believe in the open source ethos and we support the open source community wholeheartedly. We will always contribute any of our work back to their respective projects. We do donate money to certain projects and we embrace the community as without the open source community we would NOT have a business. Open Source Software and the community has allowed us to work in an industry we are passionate about. When we first launched in 2006, I said then we will always have a free product for our users that is free to distribute, free to use and free to modify. We have lived by that for 17 years and we will continue to live by that for 17 more.
3. What are our products and how do we sell them
We have Freespire and Linspire which are our home user distributions. Freespire is free of charge and can be redistributed and used on as many systems as the user see's fit. Linspire is a paid product and contains proprietary software that we do license. Xandros Enterprise Linux which is for businesses does have a free release that is called Xandros Community Edition (XCE) that is free to use, redistribute, modify etc. Xandros Enterprise Desktop and Xandros Enterprise Server are paid releases. We take feedback from users and customers of the free releases and make those changes and add functionality to our paid releases. We also offer more business related functionality in our Enterprise Linux releases. We, like Red Hat, sell service and support to our customers. Currently we have about 280 customers of our Enterprise Linux products.
4. Do we make the source code available
All of the source code to our products with the exclusion of proprietary code that we dont have the source code to is made available 100% of the time. Even to non-paying customers. That will never change nor will the source code be put behind a paywall and we will never ask customers not to make source code publicly available.
5. Our thoughts on rebuilders
We support rebuilders 100%. There are thousands of workload implementations that we cant produce products for and we fully understand the value of customers making rebuilds of Xandros Enterprise Linux and we have NO issues with customers who do. We actually have a few of them that modify it to add their own code, deploy newer kernels and alternative desktops (currently we offer GNOME) and they also understand that they are self-supporting that custom build because we cant. We do even assist them by helping them build code, recompile newer kernels and helping to deploy that system.
So in closing we believe in Open Source. We believe that our customers, partners, users and the community are vital to a healthy and thriving ecosystem. We believe rebuilders are essential to this industry and others. People who modify code, build custom distributions, and deploy specialized code are essential to a thriving industry. Whether its community distributions to commercial distributions as long as they are not being unethical or breaking the law we support them 100%
