SuSE CEO's Two-Distro World 401
FrankoBoy writes "CRN has an interview with SuSE CEO Richard Seibt in which he claims such things as 'Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else.' Another example of this kind of corporatespeak can be found in another interview he did with ZDNet last week. DistroWatch has an article about all this in its current weekly newsletter."
Gentoo? (Score:0, Informative)
http://www.gentoo.org
Correction: Two-COMPANY-World (Score:1, Informative)
about his answer on Novell (Score:5, Informative)
Novell needs a new loading OS kernel to build Netware on. DOS certainly has reached it limitations with scalability and security so linux is an obvious solution. They'll still maintain their same environment and NDS tho. But scalability is their main push. E-Directory (NDS) loads on WinNT/2k/2K3 and linux.... but keeping it in its native environment is still the most stable of course.
And the CEO's answer to a question:
CRN: What do you think of Novell buying Ximian? Does this bode well for Linux adoption on the desktop? Seibt: I would take this as a fact that Novell is taking Linux very, very seriously, and it's another fact that they are not concerned about any lawsuit. They simply believe that Linux is something that is a huge value for the customer. Think about what CA [Computer Associates] just did. They did a survey with their customers about why customers are deploying Linux. [Customers] named five reasons: performance, reliability, scalability, security and total cost of ownership, which came in fifth. What does this mean? Everybody is talking about total cost of ownership, and no doubt this is very important, because all of us have to reduce IT budgets. But customers named four other reasons. These reasons are strategic reasons why to deploy Linux.
Well what?
Re:suse and redhat alone? IDTS (Score:4, Informative)
Companies. He's talking about companies. Name 3 companies that produce Linux. Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
You also have apparently not used SuSE much, nor read all the articles about how popular it really is. It's the Red Hat of Europe, and Mandrake is taking all the scraps on the US and European markets.
Re:What other companies are there? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. (Score:5, Informative)
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE. If you buy a pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor somewhere, it will have RedHat or SuSE on it. This is basically true.
So don't jump the gun on tearing this guy a new asshole.
Only two companies? (Score:4, Informative)
Thats bullshit.
HP/Compaq bundles Mandrake. [mozillaquest.com]
And certifies systems for Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, and TurboLinux. [hp.com]
If HP isn't considerd a "large IT vendor," who is?
Re:suse and redhat alone? IDTS (Score:3, Informative)
> read all the articles about how popular it really > is. It's the Red Hat of Europe,
Really? well... we don't live in the same Europe because SuSE is nothing in the UK, nothing in France, nothing in Spain. While Mandrake is.
Sorry but Europe is not only Germany.
more knee-jerk fodder... (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, I really don't think that this interview was very interesting.
What seems to have gotten it onto Slashdot was his "only two distros" comment. However, what the person submitting the story left out was one minor detail: context.
He said HP, Sun, etc., are mostly backing off from pushing their own proprietary operating systems and opting to push Linux-based products. In that context, there are two highly relevant Linux distributions: Redhat and SuSE.
Can you name another distro with the resources to provide support to a major hardware vendor deploying Linux?
Isn't it amazing how much less interesting and inflammatory his comment seems with a little context surrounding it?
Re:Gentoo? (Score:5, Informative)
Being able to start from Stage 1 really teaches you a lot about the system, while a Stage 3 (pre-compiled) install allows you to quickly deploy a system and take advantage of the Portage without waiting a full day for KDE to compile.
I think Gentoo is definitely going to be my distro of choice from now on.
Re:suse and redhat alone? IDTS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The whole quote isn't nearly as bad (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, for a small office, just about any distro (NetBSD on the server, yeah) if administered well, would be good.
Re:suse and redhat alone? IDTS (Score:5, Informative)
If I want to buy some hardware + software, the only way to get a certified setup with Linux is to buy either Redhat or Suses server products at about $1000. For people running large Oracle or DB2 databases on IBM xSeries or Dell Poweredge servers, this is what they need.
His quote carries on with "There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors". I saw HP were supporting Debian while Bruce Perens was there, but now looking on the HP site everywhere it is RedHat or Suse.
There's definitely going to be more desktop linux vendors, but a lot of them still ride on top of Redhat or Debian, and again a lot of them cater for specific markets.
Re:Gentoo? (Score:2, Informative)
Also, please don't lump FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD together, as if they were just different distros of the same thing. (well maybe NetBSD and OpenBSD).
These three BSDs are infact all very mature forks of very old version of software. They have evolved, for the most part, indepedently. There is a lot of trading between the groups, but Linux takes stuff out of NetBSD too.
Of course ports is available in Linux too. If you feel up to installing them. Gentoo portage does a few things that bsd ports does not, although one could argue that the features of portage are not features at all but bad design.
The *BSD crowd, especially FreeBSD crowd are pretty sore about Linux being more popular. What also really hurts is the 1-way street for sourcecode. Linux can grab things out of a BSD, but a BSD can't grab things out of Linux, all due to the nasty icky GPL.
Of course my own OS is public domain, so I hate BOTH the Linux and BSD people because you'll be able to steal from my OS and I won't be able to use stuff from your OS. You all are terrible bastards.
Re:here's what the article says (Score:5, Informative)
So, lookes like SeSE has found SCO's secret stash, and/or borrowed Steve Jobs's reality distortion field.
Mandrake makes a decent all-around box (server or desktop), Slackware makes a great server, Debian has its' following, etc.
Re:The whole quote isn't nearly as bad (Score:5, Informative)
I work for a medium sized software company. We certify against Red Hat for our US customers and SuSE for our German customers. We certify against specific releases. For our customers, Linux is either Red Hat or SuSE, and they (and us) refer to those distros' version numbers, not the kernel.
We simply couldn't gurantee things like version changes to glibc might break the small amount of native libraries we ship. PAM is a mess across various distros (so far, each distro needs to be documented separately for PAM setup of our app) and we've even found problems with consistent Java support.
Getting the software to work, and coding smart s only one part of the problem. The fact is that corporate customers expect their product to be QA'd, and QA takes time and money. They also expect technical support, and the time and cost to solve "what distro are you using" problems people may call in with is just not worth it. Maintaining a matrix of distro-patches-kernel-tweaks-hardware issues for any and all distro would be nigh on impossible to do properly. We've have to offer half-assed support and QA if we supported more than a handful of specific distros.
Then there are the services. We have to keep things like LDAP and NIS in a known state, and each distro has it's own disitinct flavour. And the third-parties. We depend on some third-party apps, and these must be certified, at the right level, for each distro, for these exact same reasons. Most enterprise solutions do not exist in a vacuum; most depend on a whole slew of third-party app and integrations into services and devices. Open standards can only go so far in the real world (we've found).
Sorry; I love Linux, but corporate customer have far different needs than I do in my cubicle at work, or on my play box at home. There are just too many unknowns to risk fubarring our customers world. These unknowns exist whether or not an app is well-designed and properly robust.
This is not to say we won't support Debian or Gento or whatever. It just means that until you come along and ask us to support one of those distros or platforms, we will not certifiy it with our app suite. We've done it for FreeBSD for one single customer. We need a business case to proceed with a new platform, and we've found that each distro can behave as if it was just another UNIX platform for us: it needs to be smoke-tested and QA'd, or it will break at the exact wrong moment for our customers.
Right and wrong (Score:5, Informative)
While many vendors do support other distributions than the big two (RH & SuSE) this is mostly on the desktop. Support on the server side for large servers is pretty much restricted to these two. This is true for hardware also If you want support for larger SMP's, SAN, etc there are not many drivers for other distros. Usually you can just go ahead and try, but if something does not work the support line will tell you to replace your distro xxx with RH/SuSE where thei support it.
I've been involved in quite a few new Linux customer projects. All the time third party software (Oracle, SAP, DB2, etc) was involved as well. The only distros which are *certified* to run this stuff are Rh and SuSE. And customers do want certified installations !
Personally I'm happily running debian and gentoo, but I haven't come across commercial installation of these distributions yet.
Markus
Re:makes me think twice... (Score:3, Informative)
I ran it for a while...switched to it when a Slackware install ate itself. YaST is fairly decent at configuring stuff it knows about, but building/adding "outside" apps gets to be a little tricky. After a couple of years or so, I built an LFS box...once I was somewhat familiar with that, I started building systems around LFS instead, as it delivered a lightweight system with just the stuff you want, and it was usually a bit faster.
Nowadays, I use Gentoo...it offers most of LFS's performance advantages in an easier-to-use form. I have Slackware on an old 486 for which building LFS or Gentoo would be impractical. I suspect I'd be lost if I tried picking up SuSE again...I'd have to figure out its quirks. Ditto for Redh*t, which I've never used, aside from some poorly-configured boxes set up by a clueless "admin" who didn't know WTF he was doing. (Tried Mandrake once...pitched it after a day or two. I think the pattern that's emerging here is that the more shiny the Linux distro, the less likely I'll be able to get it to do what I want.)
Re:I almost agree with him (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wasn't SuSE (Score:4, Informative)
You also realize that IBM is a partner with UnitedLinux [unitedlinux.com]?
Labeling SuSE as evil because of it's association with UnitedLinux is as wrong as labeling TrollTech as evil because it's association with Canopy Group.
Re:Only two companies? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:here's what the article says (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like a jerk to me too, but like the man sez, it's corporatespeak. No matter what happens in the corporate world, we'll always have Slackware and Gentoo and which is fine by me, although if Red Hat and/or Suse can keep working well with the corps, then that's a good thing too. When was the last time you had a beer and listened to heavy metal with a corp exec? Hmm??
Re:makes me think twice... (Score:3, Informative)
I run SuSE 8.2 because it's the only distro I've found that will actually work on my PC - others (Mandrake, RedHat) fail to work with my RAID controller (KR7A-RAID).
SuSE's install and config tools (YAST1/2) are great for newbies like me.
Re:RTFA. (Score:3, Informative)
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE. If you buy a pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor somewhere, it will have RedHat or SuSE on it. This is basically true.
There are some small companies like HP [hp.com] that also offer Mandrake.
Re:Correction: Two-COMPANY-World (Score:1, Informative)
IMO (not trolling either), you're a fucking moron. Wow..great how you can stick that before a flame and it somehow neutralizes the effect!
Bullshit. (Re:I don't recommend suse) (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to rain on your parade, but you're into serious bullshitting territory here.
SuSE (~300 employees) has a subtancial amount of fulltime developers programming OSS day-in and day-out. They pretty much did Alsa by themselves, they did something like 90% of United Linux and they are the ones in the market offering the biggest value for the least money. They've translated big parts of the linux documentation into german and offer a solid service that goes beyond just having a cardboard box. A box with the largest paperdocumentation on a linux distro, I might add. Shure SuSE wants to make a buck, but stating that they're only focusing on their benefit and not giving back anything of substance is just plain silly.
Distros for Oracle (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's mostly just RedHat and SuSE that are supported by Oracle. Actually, SuSE just falls under UnitedLinux alongside SCO and some others. Not just any SuSE, either. The personal edition of SuSE you can download for free is not supported. You need Advanced or Enterprise Server versions of RedHat, SuSE, and other distros in order to be actually "supported" by Oracle.
That said, I'm sucessfully running Oracle 8i on Slackware and Oracle 9i on free SuSE, but those are non-production servers for evaluation.
The production servers run PostgreSQL on Slackware, naturally!
Re:Bullshit. (Re:I don't recommend suse) (Score:2, Informative)
If I'm not wrong, SuSE has supported the development of reiserfs, employs KDE developers and is active in supporting the development of more projects than Qbertino and I have mentioned.
They differ in that they don't distribute ISOs and that yast is not GPLed. Ok, one can disagree with that. If you do, fine, don't use SuSE and especially don't buy SuSE but don't forget you can still get SuSE for free. If you have to, make yourself a local mirror of their FTP Server or do a direct net install. You get the same result as installing an ISO of some other distribution.
Netcraft says differently (Score:4, Informative)
Despite the abscence of funding, Debian is the second most popular Linux distribution we find on internet web sites, surpassed only by Red Hat, and leaving the likes of SuSE and Mandrake in its wake.
So if Netcraft are to be believed, Richard Seibt seems to be right in that it is a two distro world; its just that SuSE isn't one of them.
Re:Only two companies? (Score:3, Informative)
In the UK, I've been working recently for a number of telcos and banks and without exception SuSE and RedHat are the only distros used for line-of-business applications.
Other distributions, where installed, are being replaced as part of general consolidation and management plans. Support for RH and SuSE from IT vendors such as Oracle and BEA is the main factor, but this coupled with the need to standardize results in an inexorable process of marginalization for the rest.
sparc (Score:1, Informative)
Well, up til recently, a SPARC distribution. Redhat stopped letting people download their sparc distro back around version 6, SuSE kept theirs around much longer