Extended compliance support. Enterprise level needs require a lot of paperwork just to make sure you are in legal compliance with all rules and regulations. The paperwork alone can be a very heavy costly burden on the IT department.
Any distro wanting to be serious in the enterprise space needs to offer support for that. And businesses will pay for it because it’s cheaper than having a large staff only dedicated to it. It’s part of how Ubuntu can offer you the free stuff and remain a top used distro for the masses. RedHat does the same. RedHat just rebrands the free stuff as Fedora. At least Ubuntu doesn’t hide behind a different brand name when offering sercives they charge for.
What does Ubuntu Pro get you besides extended support after the normal OS EOL?
Access to “real time” kernel which is useful for drones etc.
Kernel live patch, security updates for packages that canonical doesn’t own/maintain, and access to certain configurations/options like fips
Extended compliance support. Enterprise level needs require a lot of paperwork just to make sure you are in legal compliance with all rules and regulations. The paperwork alone can be a very heavy costly burden on the IT department.
Any distro wanting to be serious in the enterprise space needs to offer support for that. And businesses will pay for it because it’s cheaper than having a large staff only dedicated to it. It’s part of how Ubuntu can offer you the free stuff and remain a top used distro for the masses. RedHat does the same. RedHat just rebrands the free stuff as Fedora. At least Ubuntu doesn’t hide behind a different brand name when offering sercives they charge for.
…Debian. The free stuff is called Debian.
It’s also called ‘the old free stuff’. If free matters that much, you could run Slack or better yet LFS.
Ubuntu is literally Debian with an upstream Kernel. Ubuntu is charging for Debian’s labor.