So once an entity decides to “open up” its proprietary product, what does it entail?  Porting to open source operating environment is not similar to that of porting to a tightly managed operating environment (Windows, MAC OS X, HP-UX, Solaris) since there are more than a dozen varieties of Linux operating environments in the market, amongst them Ubuntu, Redhat, SUSE, Debian each with their own intricacies.  Of course one can decide to build its own distro from scratch.
Moving to open source does not alleviate typical development functions s.a. coding, testing and qa, builds and packaging, not mentioning the governance (licensing issues) requirements.
Open sourcing products provide tremendous advantages amongst them contribution to the code base by thousands of open source enthusiast throughout the world.  However, the decision of “which distribution” to start with or which ones to conform to may not be a trivial one.
