Is Red Hat the Microsoft of Linux? 694
RadioheadKid writes "This article featured on eWeek asks the question 'Red Hat: Next Redmond?' It quotes an IBM VP who says, 'There is a backlash against Red Hat from many consumers and government agencies, who fear it is increasingly becoming the Microsoft of the Linux world with respect to its dominance and attitude,' while Red Hat states: 'Our commitment to open source remains absolute, no matter what our competitors are saying.' Is this just some pro-UnitedLinux spin, or a valid concern? What do you think?" Such characterizations are nothing new, but a response on NewsForge from Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan supplies a counterpoint to make the eWeek article worth reading. (Has anyone really seen a Red Hat backlash?)
Red Hat has been there for K12Linux... (Score:5, Informative)
Time will tell if other distributions will be as well managed and forward thinking but for now I don't think we should slam RH because they got off to a good start and hired some smart people. They are working hard to produce free software for us and just happen to be doing it very well.
At K12LTSP.org [k12ltsp.org] we base our distribution for schools on RH for all of the above and the fact that over time, it's been one of the easiest and most stable versions of Linux for us to use in schools. They have been 100% supportive of us hacking their distribution and redistributing it to schools. That's about as far from Redmond as you can get. There are some good folks there in NC! Let's give some credit where credit is due.
Re: When is the last time that you checked? (Score:5, Informative)
nuff said
"Mod Parent Down!" and related mumblings (Score:2, Informative)
First, is there actually any locking in being done by Red Hat? No, it's been discussed before: they're adhering to the GPL, so if they make a change, you can get the source and change it back.
Secondly, are they making money off the sales of Linux? Not really; if you want Red Hat 7.3, you can download it and burn it to 3 or 5 CDs for connect time/blank media. If you buy a boxed set, you're getting printed documentation and support in addition. I may be oversimplifing, but it seems that the product for sale must be the printed docs and support. Red Hat does, I suppose, have a virtual monopoly on selling Red Hat-specific information... but, at a guess, most of the information in the docs and obtainable from support staff are also availible somewhere on the net for those with clues.
I'm sure just about every entity that people think is good and wholesome has its detractors, but just because you're a detractor doesn't mean you have to call Red Hat a monopoly.
Re:incomparable (Score:3, Informative)
So where in the GPL does it mention anything about ISOs? I find it scary how many people think a distro is required to be in ISO form. Some of us hate ISOs, actually. I can get a distro on my computer in a fraction of the time directly over FTP/NFS and they save on bandwidth costs.
As everybody around here has beaten to death, YaST is under the YaST license, which allows you to anything you want with the freely-available source, except profit when you make changes. (ie: no rebranding) What hasn't been pointed out though is that the installer is not just YaST. The first piece is Linuxrc, a nice little program written by Hubert Mantel of SuSE, which is GPLed and was used in DemoLinux. The hardware detection part, hwinfo and the libhd library, is very comprehensive, and even detects TV cards and braille terminals. It is also GPL. The base of the OS, a collection of programs and files contained in the aaa_base package, is also under the GPL. That includes SuSEconfig, fillup, and a bunch of other utilities.
You seem to be only concerned with installation/maintenance tools, though. That's good for me, because I don't want to be here all night listing software
These statements have no basis in reality. They're bad even for Slashdot. How do you come to the conclusion that simple framebuffer access is less efficient than X11? Do you even know how these things work? Your monopoly accusation is also preposterous. All of Trolltech's competitors are using the framebuffer as well. That's not what I call a monopoly.
Trolltech, in using the GPL, are encouraging more free software. If you do want to make commercial software, Trolltech's prices are very cheap, especially considering how quickly you can write apps in Qt. Ask any developer using Qt and they will tell you that it more than pays for itself. Also remember that there are no distribution licensing fees, so it will not increase the price of a device/piece of software, only decrease it.
Re:Quality issues (Score:2, Informative)
Take what I say with a grain of salt but..
I think RedHat released the broken gcc 2.96 for a reason. I think they feared that no one would be ready for the 3.x changeover, and by pushing 2.96, they would insure that most apps would be compatible and ready for the new gcc.
Also, since it's mildly broken, it gives developers an incentive to finish the real version fast and fix their mistakes, making software innovation faster... in a sort of sneaky underhanded way.
Then again, 2.95 had some bug with compiling bash on a certian arch or something, so that's probably the real reason... but still, it's fun to theorize.
Besides, look at apps like mplayer. They refused to code 2.96 workarounds. Their configure script won't even finish if it detects 2.96. That shows that no one is really locked into RedHat's 'Standards'
Just a thought.
RPMS are universal (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Redhat is not Evil (although occasionally stupi (Score:3, Informative)
Why not? I'll say it: people were wrong for hating it. RedHat made the best decision. Their one mistake was not explicitly marking the compiler as their own - people thought it was an official gcc release.
Anyone who thinks the gcc 2.96 compiler is buggy should read this page [bero.org].
They already are LSB compliant (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No, no, no... (Score:3, Informative)
Looking at making one desktop? They're just trying to make both desktops look consistent. All the apps are still there. Konqueror is still there. KMail is still there. And you can use both of them if you want to.
They sell non-open-source software? That may be true (although I don't know any of their proprietary programs; can you name one?), but most of their software are open source. That includes the installer and all the configuration tools. Those are all GPL'ed. And they release the source code of their patches, including the patches for BSD-like-licensed programs like XFree86.
Re:Not lock in customers? Hah! (Score:3, Informative)
The vendors of those commercial applications are unlikely to support you using rpm on Debian to install their product, but that's because they probably don't support Debian, anyway. In which case it doesn't matter how they ship it.
If you're too fucking stupid to understand that rpm is no more "proprietary lock-in" than using newfangled gzip instead of real Unix compress on your tarballs, you shouldn't be working with computers, you should be scratching in the dirt with a stick.
Re:Exactly, the difference is if you don't like MS (Score:4, Informative)
Why in the world should RedHat encourage ESRI to create packages for their competitors? RedHat has done their part by becoming LSB certified (they didn't have to do that, and if they hadn't become certified the LSB would be deader than a doornail).
RedHat has gained their lead by writing cool software and giving it away. Most of their erstwhile competition (ie Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux) tried to lock their customers into proprietary software that they layered on top of Linux. RedHat, on the other hand, gave their tools away. RedHat's tools, and the RedHat distribution, became the most popular despite the fact that Caldera, SuSE, and others often had better tools. The difference was that RedHat's tools were Free.
Personally, I use Debian Linux, but I am tired of all of the bellyaching by the other commercial distributions.