Red Hat CEO Decries Open Source Pretenders 171
OSTalent writes "The Register has an article about Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik's recent remarks...'For all his enthusiasm about the community and sever-side Linux, Szulik provided something of a reality check on the much debated theme of a Linux desktop. According to Szulik, the huge presence of legacy infrastructure like Microsoft's Exchange and PowerPoint has prevented a lot of people making the move.'" From the article: "It's very difficult to shape the development agenda of the community... every day people comment to us on the quality of our products through Kerrnel.org. What's important is staying true to the premise of the GPL model ... It starts with the APIs now, then it moves into content. Try to put [Microsoft's] Windows Media Player into Firefox and see what it looks like. In a world where application-to-application interaction becomes the norm, where does that innovation come from and who owns it?"
Re:Powerpoint? (Score:3, Informative)
The effor for migration macros, isnt derived from a bad "emulation" of the language, The OpenOffice macro language, is almos equal thant the language at Microsoft Macros, the difference is that, at OpenOffice, there are a lot of restricctions, strict typing for variables and method calling, so you are unable to create Macro Virii for OpenOffice.
About Project management. There are also more evolved tools, phpgroupware, dotproyect, but Yes, I must say that Project is a easy and quick to modify proyect managment tool, but when trying to keep sincronized amog a lot of users, then something web-enable is easier, with out the high costs Project + Office integration demands.
And about visio, stick figures are useful only to illiterated clients, that doesnt even have the hability to understad that a boxed item is a part of the process... If you are to draw process diagrams, you could use tools and standards made for that, for example use the UML bussines extensions, or the BMP XML notation.
Bussines Modeling Process (BMP) has a very good drawing tool: Jawe, and BMP looks further onto the integration of process development and IT.
OpenOffice has a very sweet gallery to be used with OpenDraw or OpenWriter, and for more complex graphics, you can use Dia, or the galleryes for OpenOffice.
So, thinking about visio and project as stoppers, means that you are getting anachronic to the market tendencies, and YES, this is fault of Microsoft, which pretends to keep every one aspect of the industry under they rate of development.
Re:Powerpoint?? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know what it's worth because I've never used it yet but you can use some LaTeX packages like Beamer [sourceforge.net] or Prosper [colorado.edu] (tutorial here [freshmeat.net]) to create PowerPoint-like presentations. The result seems very professional for most of my needs.
The only tool I used up to now was OpenOffice.org with some Xfig drawings for the graphs, there is no point in using Windows+PowerPoint if you generate a PDF you can use everywhere (unless you want to edit it with Microsoft Office...)
Excel?! (Score:2, Informative)
More evidence of excel errors (Score:5, Informative)
For those interested in Excel errors, here are other sources:
Re:Powerpoint? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice's Present module can give a customer with PowerPoint software something they can use. Likewise, Visio can be replaced with any of a bunch of drawing programs (xfig with transfig can export to a number of formats).
If you don't want to run Windows, you'll find that there's few business reasons really compelling you to do so.
If your company runs Exchange, then Evolution (Linux) or Apple Mail (Mac OS X) can run as a client just fine.
If your company requires Office, then OpenOffice is a great tool (Linux--try NeoOffice for Mac OS X).
Your argument worked a few years ago, but the offerings for non-Windows systems have improved remarkably. Macintosh graphics software has always been great, and Linux has had a few of its own great programs as well. However, some great software is now available multi-platform, and the reason for sticking with Windows (or Linux or Mac) is no longer as compelling.
You can now make a business justification for using any operating system nowadays. If you want to keep shoveling money to Microsoft, fine. If you want a great desktop experience, there's Apple ready to sell you some really sexy hardware and software. If you want to go dirt cheap, there's Linux. It's all a matter of taste... and saying that "your business requires you to use Windows" only works if your only customer is Microsoft.
Re:Powerpoint? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:4, Informative)
Yast is GPL (Score:3, Informative)
Yast has been GPL for a while now. Here's a news.com.com.com.com.bork.bork.bork [com.com] article from March 2004 about it.
Err... AutoCAD? (Score:4, Informative)
Not true, you forgot AutoCAD.
To date, there is no CAD software for Linux that even half resembles the capability of ACAD. The best thing I've found is Cycus, but it is nowhere close. I wish everybody would stop fiddling with icon suites and desktop skins and get to work on a real GPL CAD application.
The entire design, building, and construction industry is hinged on AutoCAD. Oh sure, there are plenty of so-called competitors, but when #2 (Microstation) decides to flip its entire file format to AutoCAD's proprietary format that's a pretty good indication of who owns the market.
The pathetic thing is that AutoCAD is a house of cards. It is a mishmash of Lisp, VBA, C, C++, DCL, VB, dotNet, and is wildly unstable. The features are always changing and every release crushes all previous version file formats. It is the biggest assembly of bolt-on code for such a huge pile of money you can imagine.
But AutoCAD still rules, nobody in GPL-land is really paying attention.
What the VCs are saying about desktop Linux. (Score:5, Informative)
I sat down with the Directory of IT Security for Kaiser Permanente, a major HMO here in California. He liked the Linux desktop concept I put in front of him, but then stated that they have over 2000 home grown Windows applications that they built in-house upon which they are dependent to run their business. Other people have told me about how they can much more easily develop useful applications with Visual Basic than you can with Gtk and other standard 'IX tools.
We may sit here and go on about the shortcomings of Windows and Visual Basic, but in the world where you're actually trying to sell product, the perception of your market is also their Reality. Is there another tool, similar in ease of use to Visual Basic, that is available for people to quickly and easily create applications on Linux?
For some time I've believed that the first place that desktop Linux would get into would be those shops where the users are production workers who spend their day doing repetitive tasks such as data entry, medical transcriptions, or work at call centers. As I've been researching call center operations, I've come to find that dialing and "Computer Telephony Integration" software are the mission critical applications. Of course they're all written for Windows. So how does Linux break into that market?
What keeps kicking around in my brain is that the early adopters of Linux on the desktop are governments - China, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Israel. All are moving to Linux.
When I talk to college IT directors, the idea of using Linux desktops gets met with that "deer in the headlights" look when they anticipate the mass revolt they'd experience from the faculty and student body.
The $64 billion question is, who's going to use desktop Linux and how are they going to use it? If y'all could suggest some industries and/or markets you feel that Linux could easily be adopted into, I'd love to hear it, because if it's really there, I'm gonna go get it!
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:3, Informative)
There's also Dia [gnome.org], which also has a windows version, and it's not limited to just UML modelling.