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?"
Powerpoint? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah - the killers for me at least are Excel, Visio and Project. The OpenOffice version of the first doesn't scale near to where I need it, and porting macros is way too much effort, and the second two still don't have any real equivalents in the Linux space.
Embedded Windows Media in Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
However, Windows Media and M$ Office embedded media use a lot of M$-specific stuff to make it work properly. It's not just windows media that is a problem, it's also scaling graphics.
Here is a sample with IE and Firefox screenshots showing both image scaling problems and embedded media problems. This is from a few months ago but the problems persist with Firefox.
http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/PowerPoi
Likewise for Visio (Score:2, Interesting)
Hard as it is to admit if you love OSS, if you really are a "knowledge worker", its worth paying the MS tax for access to things like Excel and Visio. And if you exchange files with customers, you have even less choice.
IMHO, the way to dislodge Microsoft is not by positioning linux desktop as a viable alternative for hardcore knowledge warriors. Instead its to go after the next tier down. The average pleb sitting at his computer in the bowels of a Bank does not use Visio, or really even MS Word, on a constant basis.
Those people could get by fine on a good desktop distro, as long as they had Citrix-style access to the serious Windows-based applications running on a server. They might only need them twice a day, but when they need them, they do need them. One MS license could probably serve 5 people if it was pooled like this...
Re:Powerpoint? (Score:2, Interesting)
Good point regarding OpenOffice.org. I can't quite say that it has reached the level of functionality that Powerpoint has but if your presentation needs Powerpoint than it is probably badly designed.
Come to think of it, though, it would be nice if Impress had some more backgrounds.
Re:Bitching doesn't help, action does. (Score:1, Interesting)
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Main_Page [redhat.com]
If you want desktop support software the company to look at is Novell, not realy Redhat. Redhat is good at what they do, Novell is good at desktop infrastructure.
For isntance take the NDS model, they made it possible to do the whole desktop enterprise thing with Windows, and Microsoft made their inferior copy of it called Active Directory. Novell was the pioneers and they still can be.
Novell is working on evolution, hula and a veriaty of other products (glitz and cairo for gnome for instance). Email, calendering, contact for the average person, for the average company.
Kerberos and LDAP works in Linux. I do it, and I am a fairly stupid person. It's a pain in the ass compared to Active directory, but that parts that matter can be done now. Hopefully somebody will make tools to make it easier.
RH Get Evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
According to Szulik, the huge presence of legaet PGP capabilities that infrastructure like Microsoft's Exchange
RH should try Evolution and get off the pot. You even get PGP that Microsft does not have.
Suse it better than RH from what I can tell, it even recognized my 54g D-Link G650 card and works great.
Linux is ready for the desktop, and many new countries to desktop computing are NOT using the North American status quo of Microsoft. The biggest reason Microsoft has a market share at all in China is because pirated copies are FREE. If not for that fact, the upcoming worlds biggest market would be Linux. Even Dell and HP sell Linux desktops and portable in China that we cannot get in North America.
The OS market is heating up and Novell seems to be making ground on Red Hat. And they are feeling the heat.
Re:Powerpoint? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone?
Re:non-sequitur (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason that I personally will do my best to avoid redhate at all costs in the future is that they played bait and switch with us, the users. They provided us with a stable distribution which many of us actually gave them money for, and then they changed their terms entirely by making you pay for the stable version, and only giving you an alpha/beta version. I will not play these games with a person, or a retail outlet, or a software publisher.
Re:Visio (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Visio (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.thekompany.com/projects/kivio/ [thekompany.com]
All I have to say is: Holy Crap. I almost knew everything about this from my visio experience (Not a lot, but I could get aroind). A lot of the symbols were the same, and it did had all the little nice things visio had. If you have ubuntu or another distro with a good package manager, I'd heartily recommend trying this program.
Re:non-sequitur (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Excel?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, he criticizes Gnumeric: "On this basis alone, the RNG (random number generator) in Gnumeric can be judged as unacceptable for statistical purposes."
Re:Powerpoint? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe I should append that to "I did my job before Microsoft bought Visio".
Visio is a de-facto standard for passing around everything from SAN designs to workflow solutions to org-charts. Although the functionality of the program is important, file compatibility is the killer. Same with project, and excel macros. I'm not saying that any of these are best of breed, but I need to be able to share documents with people all around the world, and I have to run what they run.
Re:legacy products (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Heck (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:5, Interesting)
In my workplace we are finding out that Visio doesn't scale well enough. We have ~100MB of source code branched into say 10 different variants, with comparable amounts of documentation in visio and word.
CVS takes care of configuration management in the code but in the doc we have to have multiple copies of everything and merges are totally manual.
We are just unable to maintain so much documentation. I am working on a project to port the docs to xml and svg, and commit them to cvs.
There are many free svg programs out there which will do everything we are doing with visio.
Re:Bitching doesn't help, action does. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully, I'm looking to get a Hula [hula-project.org], Knowledge Tree [ktdms.com], Fedora Directory [redhat.com], (I hate OpenLDAP, and I don't want to pay for Novell's) server, with pGina [xpasystems.com] for Windows client authentication. I haven't tried OpenOffice with a WebDav server backend, but if that worked with revisioning, you have all the parts for a completely open-source server/infrastructure that meets the requirements that I mentioned. I just don't know if I'm going to have time to ever put it together, and some projects aren't mature enough to completely replace their MS counterparts. Hula especially, as right now it has only limited client support for all the applications, but it supports LDAP, and it's not a bunch of recycled parts with no management parts like Kolab. They should rename that project Kobble. But hopefully soon, all the parts will be production ready.
Man do I go off topic.
Re:Likewise for Visio (Score:3, Interesting)
CrossOver Office allows you to move to Linux and still keep some of the Windows apps that take longer to migrate. Linux, OpenOffice.org, Evolution, Firefox and VideoLAN are great but there are still some apps that don't have good enough equivalents on Linux. Visio and Project are two biggies that can be handled by CrossOver Office.
-Charles
Re:legacy products (Score:1, Interesting)
Can I have a few pints of whatever you're drinking? 1. Exchange is in NO WAY stable - mean time to crash is measured in minutes rather than hours. 2. Possibly true, but ALL the applications are as abysmal as Exchange. 3. That it's MS's "main server paltform" should be a source of real shame for the company. 4. Outlook (all versions) is just a total disaster - it's unstable, full of security holes and actually makes an already poor "operating system" almost unusable. 5. Who wants "Windows Mobile"? - there are NO Windows Mobile devices that actually work properly! 6. Anyone who tries to use Small Business Server is wasting their time. It simply doesn't work: it's unstable and insecure. Anyone trusting their business data to it really doesn't see any real future in their business.
Re:Bitching doesn't help, action does. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxsmallbiz/ [novell.com]
I would also like to note that in the country I live(Norway) I see that Microsoft Small Buisness Server with 5 clients costs above 6000,- Norwegian kroner(It would actually be about $1000), whereas as far as I can see, Novell Small Buisness Server costs... $475, and I do believe that includes eDirectory, 100 clients, etc. That's _HALF_ the price of Microsoft SBS, and eDirectory is a dream come true.
Of course anyone wanting to change platform should do some real testing before deploying it in a production environment, but that's why there's Fedora Core and OpenSUSE.
Re:PowerPoint (Score:3, Interesting)
I have yet to see a *single* PowerPoint presentation that I would in any way consider useful, informative, or basically anything other than a complete waste of time.
I'm often wary of those who talk about their worlds in such stark, absolute terms.
you (SIC) can't readily make drastic changes to a PowerPoint presentation on-the-fly
You mis-spelled "I". As in "I can't readily make drastic changes to..."
One can. One just has to know the tool. And the tool is dead simple. And the changes make for a good artifact, unlike the white board, which in virtually all environments has to be meticulously recorded onto paper, by hand. Now that's SLOW!
The white board does have it's place. It's as much about context, as anything else. One
C//