Sponsored: Amit Ronen of Wind River talks to Annie Turner about the growing role of Linux in an increasingly connected world as the communications landscape becomes more complex.
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Amit Ronen is Senior Vice President Customer Success at Wind River, which is a tough job because as ever-smarter edge devices proliferate they are changing the landscape but they themselves also need to develop further and be supported – and all without degradation to customer experience. Indeed, customers’ expectations are that their experiences will improve. Ronen talks about the challenges and opportunities of squaring this circle – and how he addresses the common question from customers and partners about why they should pay for a commercial version open source software when Linux is ‘free’.
As Ronen explains, there are many hidden costs and effort required in maintaining a sufficiently robust Linux distribution, which include the resources and substantial, highly skilled team needed to develop future functions as well as support those out in the field for the next five to 10 years. We explore the many potential pitfalls around enterprises deciding to run their own distribution, including the dangers of forking instead of keeping up with the open source community’s progress.