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."
What other companies are there? (Score:4, Insightful)
I almost agree with him (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, my years of using and contributing to Debian (which is not a company) may have skewed my viewpoint somewhat.
Re:makes me think twice... (Score:1, Insightful)
Does anyone actually run SuSE Linux outside of Europe? If so, why? Red Hat is basically the Linux standard distro if you want to run commercial software, and Mandrake is simple to install and run for newbies. What does SuSE bring to the table?
hardware support? (Score:3, Insightful)
/joeyo
Linux Distros are just like Hardrives. (Score:4, Insightful)
The bottom line is, most distros work on most hardware without significant problems. There will always be fanboys who cry for years because they had one or two bad experiences with a Distro.
He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
Arguing about whether or not to use GNU in your name, or which GUI is more "free" than the other is irrelevant to most companies. They want good products, not irrelevant nerd-speak. Red Hat and Suse have forged past the anarchistic free-for-all attitude of hackers and made Linux much more approachable. Anyone who says otherwise is probably just jealous of their success...
He does have a point.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat has pushed Linux into the spot light more than any other company has - ok this is where I get flamed - but honestly what companies other than Red Hat have targeted more than the fat-guru-programmer stereotype nix user. Gentoo and Slackware definaetly don't expect anyone but a power user to even touch there distros. Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt. Red Hat and Suse are the only 2 companies that have successfully made money selling linux to both corporations and home users, and of the 2 Red Hat is by far more "KNOWN"
Misinterpretation... Calm down! (Score:4, Insightful)
try reading the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't know about you - but I see very few other distributions out there on corporate boxes...
It (Score:4, Insightful)
All he's saying is that in the corporate market most of the support is related to these two companies. Personally I think he's wrong, but he's not trying to deny the existance of other distros or anything.
If you look at this, it's wrong no matter how you interpret it. Literally, he left out a damned big company - IBM. Yes, they use Red Hat's stuff, but to say "Linux means two companies - Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else" is just flat wrong on that basis.
If you want to be assume he meant distros, then obviously he left out like 50.
You would have to interpret that as "companies who release their own distros under their own name" for that to make any sense, but by that time, it's irrelevant. The major players aren't the companies making the distros, it's those like IBM getting it on machines. Among companies with distros, only Red Hat (not SuSE!) has had any real impact doing that. SuSE's penetration is far less, especially outside Deutschland.
So, to me, the only sense in which his statement is true is that in which it's barely relevant. Sorry to SuSE, but they have nowhere near the impact of Red Hat or IBM.
Ultimately, he's trying to sound as if SuSE is half of the non-MS world, and that's nowhere near the case
Re:I almost agree with him (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux is not an OS. Hasn't this been said enough times yet?
-WS
Most importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
What's most important is that with Linux there is no way that they can prevent any other company that decides to step up and bring a distro to market.
This fact will keep them on their toes via the omnipresent shadow of the unknown competitor just around the corner and it means that even if they decide to abandon Linux ten years from now, any of the other distros can come in a take up the slack.
Re:Gentoo? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyways. First part, is BSD does have
BSD doesn't overload
The way Linux has overloaded
The proper way to do a lot of these things would to use an ioctl on the device that the information would be associated with. And that's generally how most operating systems deal with it.
Re:here's what the article says (Score:2, Insightful)
I think he's right (Score:5, Insightful)
After seeing all the outraged comments on here ("Waddyamean he thinks my copy of Gentoo isn't a distro?!"), I'm surprised, because I think he's right (at least, in terms of corporate distros). Before any holy warriors mod me down for saying this, I should provide a disclaimer...OK...here goes...I am a distro bigot, and I would never use anything but Slackware (if it's my decision to make), because all the major distros are disgustingly bloated. Slackware -- it rocks. RH/SuSE/etc -- they suck. Just the facts, ma'am. *ducks*
Now that we've got that important fact out of the way, let's look at Oracle. Last I checked, Slackware, Gentoo, and other distros that lean further toward the hobbyist/programmer/hacker end of things were not supported by Oracle -- it was only SuSE and RedHat. It's not just Oracle -- as a general rule, if you find some proprietary software that they're trying to make a Linux port of, and they name a distro, it's about 90% likely to "support" RedHat and maybe 40% likely to "support" SuSE.
Reason for the quotes around "support" would be that most of the time, a specific distro is not needed. It's the same kernel and most of the same FS setup (well, Slackware's init scripts are a little bit bett^H^H^H^Hdifferent, since they follow BSD instead of SysV). However, naming the distro supplies a corporation with the perfect ass-covering if it's something their tech-support hasn't been trained on. "What, you don't use RedHat? Well, I'm sorry, but we can't support your software. Even though you paid us $5,000 this quarter for gold-level support. It's broken -- you fix it."
It comes of picking something very specific to train $6.50/hr helpdesk personnel who aren't likely to investigate and learn a new distro. Plus a reason I can sympathize a bit more with: If the customer is breathing down the company's neck to fix this problem that they had with a homebrew distro some BOFH in the customer's IT dept. crafted, it will cost a lot of time, money, and perhaps contracts (as the customer gets more impatient) to get it fixed. Better to go with an extremely common standard, even though they are the lowest common denominator in terms of distros.
So I agree -- to the corporate world, there are only SuSE and RedHat distros. The rest just aren't supported.
Re:Gentoo? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean "alternative" as in "same old shit with a different name"? Was that horribly poor comparison on purpose?
He's right (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, this is another non-story.
Re:makes me think twice... (Score:2, Insightful)
Tools are far from perfect. And they occasionally fail, even when used as intented.
Re:I thought it was (Score:2, Insightful)
wouldn't it be:
Debian/Gentoo/Slackware vs. Redhat/Suse/Mandrake
Slackware is a major player, and many people still use it.
Interesting - a troll embedded in an article. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors."
Tough to argue with that.
Re:Gentoo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, what I'm enjoying right now is the fact that I know exactly what's on the machine, and that I can add or remove packages at will with a single, simple command line call. Or that I can check for updates and patch them just as easily.
Most people do focus on the "from source" nature of Gentoo, but that's really only a small part of it. Gentoo's still a relatively young distribution, and I think that it's yet to fully define itself. I think that as it matures, there will still be a bleeding edge aspect to it, but that it may very well more drift towards an Unstable/Testing/Stable type system much like Debian. Really, it's already starting to happen - the ~x86 keyword for example, and the "heresy" of distributing binaries.
Re:I thought it was (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)