Red Hat Reaping Benefits From Novell/MSFT deal?

Ho Kooshy Fly writes "It seems that at least one software group has seen the use of Red Hat substantially increase over Novell as of late. EWeek theorizes that this may be backlash from the patent deal with Microsoft. From the article: 'The survey's findings can also be extrapolated to the broader open-source software industry and are not limited to those enterprise customers using Alfresco software "because of the wide range of open-source and proprietary software use cases captured and the large sample size of the survey," [Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer] said. "We think these findings accurately reflect the broad technology trends across modern stacks in organizations of all sizes." Gallup polls about U.S. presidential candidates typically survey about 1,000 likely voters, while Alfresco surveyed more than 10,000 people, he said.'"

Alfresco never directly asked the Question

[darthcamaro]

The eWeek story got it wrong. Internetnews.com got it right. From their article [internetnews.com]: "in an interview with internetnews.com, Howells admitted that he lacked that empirical evidence to back up his allegation. "All we've got is the raw statistics," Howells said. "We expected general trends to be similar, but what we saw was a big divergence going from the two platforms being almost the same to one tripling in size. We were looking at various reasons for that, and there may be a number of reasons for that but we don't actually know the specific reason." Among the other reasons why Red Hat users may well have increased is the emergence of a new Red Hat release -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) -- which was released in mid-March just a few weeks ahead of when the Alfresco study began. Novell on the other hand had no similar product launch event at any point near the Alfresco study. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 690141 [internetnews.com]

Nothing to do with rubbish marketing

[zerogeewhiz]

No, Novell's marketing is spot-on, it's the MS deal that's done it.

Novell haven't the faintest idea how to promote and articulate SUSE (do most people even know it's SUSE outside the geek community?) and are bleeding the people who can at a rapid rate, at least the ones I know.

CxO's don't give a toss about deals with MS, they care about brands and RedHat are as strong as they come backed up with better marketing.

I don't work for RedHat and I'm a Mac bigot, so I think I'm reasonably balanced.

PostgreSQL

[Bacon Bits]

PostgreSQL has grown dramatically since 8.x was released. Easy Windows support really helps because, like it or not, a lot of developers write on Windows and publish on Linux.

People tend to move to PostgreSQL when they find they need features MySQL lacks, get hung up on some of the odd issues MySQL can have, or find they have licensing issues with MySQL. The biggest drawback for PostgreSQL is that you actually have to configure it when you install it, or it will think it's running on a system with very minimal specs. It's also more complex than MySQL, but still nowhere near MS SQL Server 2005.