Sun's COO Pretends Linux Belongs To Red Hat 391
An anonymous reader writes "Ever mindful of minting phrases likely to spread virally through the Net, reports JDJ, Jonathan Schwartz's blogging gifts were used Friday to assert that "it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux." The article comes up with a new angle on one of the most-talked about members of the tech-exec digerati, saying of Schwartz: "He's the Winston Churchill of technology - he mobilizes the English language at least once a week, and sends it into battle against Sun's rivals." But Churchill would never have tried to pull a fast one by disingenuously describing Linux as "Red Hat's Linux" - the community will upbraid him, for certain. Churchill Schmurchill, Schwartz is a technology mischief-maker not a technology statesmen."
typical of executive staff being insanely stupid. (Score:1, Interesting)
they certianly are not hired for their smarts.
they are hired for their SALES ability.
they are all nothing more than high profile sales people... and we all know what kind of people are in sales.
Novell? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Novell? They bought Suse which was a strong distro, and Ximian which holds the track-record for providing cool UI's for Linux.
What are their ambitions? They have a couple of very nice cards to play - why don't they?
On another, but related, note, what made FreeBSD (as OS X) the success it became once Apple added UI? The Apple brand and hardware? What does it take for Novell to get the same level of recognition?
A worried shareholder..
Re:Mac OS X? (Score:3, Interesting)
So what? Linux distros are compatible enough that only the most old-school care about whether Red Hat or Debian or Novell or whoever have more "market share". The only thing that's interesting is how many people are using Linux vs XYZ platform.
I've not seen any hard statistics on this because there aren't any. You cannot count Linux installations, so it's pointless trying to use statistics to prove a point here. In my world (a university) I'd say I know more people using Linux than using Macs, just, but that's probably because it's a university. If I worked at a design house I'd probably have to say the opposite.
Red Hat has the highest marketshare out of Linux.. (Score:1, Interesting)
According to Netcraft, most Linux servers are running Red Hat:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/07/12/slig
The other distributions each by its own numbers do not make a difference at all!
Red Hat is single handedly the most easy to use and biggest known Linux brand name. Most of the IT people I know use Red Hat interchangably with Linux. It's like Kleenex [kleenex.com] or Aspirin [tinyurl.com] Aspirin. It has become an every day household name.
Wazzamatter ? Post 1 is on topic! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Novell? (Score:3, Interesting)
Novell is able to use their kickass server software and their existing customer base to launch their linux campaign. They are bundling their top notch support on top of their linux products (desktop for now, server to be released in the near future). Novell has one hell of a plan, and only Novell could pull it off.
I wouldn't worry about a thing, Novell is a strong company and quite ambitious when it comes to linux.
based on numbers of desktops running them... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is clearly just a Sun bigot wishing they were more successful in the marketplace.
I think that a more interesting comparison is between *nix-derived systems and Windows. That would lump Solaris, Linux (all flavors), BSD (all flavors, including OS X), and AIX into one pool, which is sizeable enough to make a definite presence on Microsoft's radar.
Re:Could be worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Sun has the ear of lots of the UNIX community in the corporate realm, including the PHBs and admins who still think Linux is a toy. There are, unfortunately, a lot of them with their heads in the sand. That is why I run Linux on my U5 at the office... and remind them of how fast and stable it is fairly often ;)
The guy is a clown. (Score:2, Interesting)
While SCO stories have some value as entertainment, JS seems to be more boring each time. How can I filter my Slashdot front page to remove stories about Schwartz?
Robert
Misunderstanding the english language (Score:3, Interesting)
Hint : these are not posessions
Re:Nit-pick (Score:3, Interesting)
A "kernel" is nothing more than THE fundamental piece of an operating system. Its sole purpose is to provide interaction between other peices of the operating system and the bare metal of the hardware in a secure, standard way.
The operating system, on the other hand, is responsible for not only interfacing with the hardware (via a kernel), it is responsible for loading and managing user level applications such as shells and mouse daemons and whatnot.
In fact, the difference can be highlighted by pointing out that there is, technically, no reason you couldn't run an operating system without a kernel. If things like bash just worked directly on the hardware, you could forgo your kernel altoghter. Likewise, if all you have is a kernel, you can't do anything. You need the other pieces of the operating system to actually do anything useful.
'linux' is a kernel. On its own, it is mostly useless for any practical purpose.
Red Hat is an entire operating system. Without a kernel, it becomes useless.
Why can't I mod the top story down? (Score:1, Interesting)
Let's try my interpretation:
"There are only three commercial operating systems of importance left: Microsoft's Windows, Red Hat's version/distribution of Linux, and Solaris."
Technically, that is correct. Ask any ISV out there, and they don't certify their Linux apps to "Linux" or even a particular Linux kernel, they certify them to certain distributions, primarily Red Hat and SuSE. And from a market share perspective, Red Hat has about 90% of the commercial Linux market. And Fedora has a large percentage of the non-commercial Linux market because it is Red Hat's distribution. And the Fedora users are mostly people trying to avoid Red Hat's pricing model.
I remember the Slashdot articles that pop up every couple of years saying Red Hat is the new Microsoft. The truth is, we all should be concerned that Red Hat essentially has a monopoly on the commercial Linux market. And the commercial Linux market is where the future of Linux is: Oracle on Linux, BEA on Linux, IBM DB2 on Linux, etc., etc. This builds an ecosystem that makes Linux grow more. It causes major commercial ISVs like Oracle to contribute major technology to Linux. At Oracleworld today, you didn't see Linus Tovalds or OSDL sharing the spotlight, it was Red Hat.
Linux is at risk of becoming like other open source projects like MySQL and StarOffice where there is only one vendor of commercial, supported versions of the product. This is not good, because that version becomes a defacto standard.
Red Hat already has the power to create its own custom kernel in RHEL AS 3.0, its own custom destktop, etc. Yes, it is still open source, but where is The Bazzar? Does anybody still remember when Linux distros had pretty much the same kernel and the difference was in the layered software, package managers, and installers?
TurboLinux used to be a player, before Red Hat expanded to Asia. SuSE used to dominate the european Linux market, until Red Hat expanded into europe. Perhaps Novell's acquisition of SuSE will create a commercial Linux duopoly, but I doubt it. My guess is in three or four years Novell will be focusing on add-on and systems management software for Red Hat Linux, just like it eventually did with Windows.
So Schwartz is right. The only version of Linux that matters among commercial users of Linux (that is anyone using packaged ISV apps), is Red Hat's version. It is unfortunate, but it is true.