Exactly.

Posted Feb 8, 2008 19:25 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

...want to sell their products to Linux business users. They are there to make money, after all. Linux business users get the same Linux software everyone else gets, more-or-less. If that software is unreliable, business users won't use it, which means Linux products won't sell.

Why sell to Linux users in the first place? Too many variants of Unix, too many of which only have a subset of the features needed or wanted, too much competition from Microsoft and generally not much security. A unified baseline that has Linux has a key platform has far better odds of long-term survival. Provided it can be brought to some provable (rather than anecdotal) quality level.

But to do that, money must be spent on Linux QA. You've got to make people want Linux, want it so bad that alternatives aren't worthy of consideration. That won't happen until there has been some serious QA.

What if no QA happens at all? Then businesses will regard Linux as something vendors aren't interested in, and those businesses will go elsewhere, costing those vendors potential sales. Sure, it would be nice if the Debian community did more QA work, but really QA is a full-time job and most Debian deveopers have two or three of those already. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.