Red Hat Reaping Benefits From Novell/MSFT deal? 71
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.'"
Re:I would put my usual anti-linux troll here (Score:4, Funny)
no bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The patent deal I doubt would cause any impact on sales - I mean, unless there are high powered idiots making decisions based on emotive overtones rather th
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You've just described every executive at every large company in the US. The executive washroom is a logic-free zone.
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Sun suffers from the same problem - awesome products marketing terribly; heck, its proven here with idiots making stupid statements that Solaris is only for SPARC, that Sun doesn't sell x86/x64 machines etc. etc. Ignorant goes both ways, and I'm alw
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In reality, there are a lot of *Linux users* who think that Linux is a science project, not suitable for important tasks. I remember Ubuntu users lecturing me how I should have my Windows CD ready when installing Ubuntu, in case Ubuntu has problems installing. And it did. And they asked why I didn't "play it safe" by having my Windows CD
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Implicit in this statment is that "directors of IT and CIOs" do not consider "science" to be "important" (all dependant, of course, on broad generalisations of "directors ...", "science" and "important"). Which would be quite worrying, were it true, as a description of the general "importance" of "science" in the society you describe.
What is very worryin
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But that's impossible! The free market for executive labor ensures that only the absolute best and brightest ever make it to executive positions. I mean, come one! There's no government interference in the executive salary market, so it has to be working perfectly. We all know that the only time markets fail to be the closest solution to God-like perfection is when government interferes. Therefore, these executives are making all the right decisions, based solely
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PostgreSQL (Score:2, Informative)
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 mi
Can someone explain it to me? (Score:2)
Does anyone have a hint of what their actual strategy is? So far they are just eliminating some smaller distros on the market and making it easier for the bigger distros to gain further traction.
Is this the idea? Help consolidate the market, so you have only 2-3 major distros to sue eventually for patent infringement?
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There's always going to be change. That's why I recommend grabbing the small script to generate your own Linux distribution. With the only investment being a DNS registration for your new site, run the distro build script, watch it generate user forums with its AI to help build your wiki site, wait for Microsoft to send the forms, sign them, and wait for the multimillion dollar check
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Can someone explain it to me...why Microsoft went into these deals anyway?
Yes.
Winux
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Yes.
Winux
And it'll be free and released under GPL3, right.
They remind of the british in india (Score:3, Insightful)
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Divide and Rule [wikipedia.org]. It is a good stategy, and some open source people really do fall for it. GPL3 from a corporate perspective is not a very positive thing. So i would think that community is already showing lots of divide, although that could just be because there are lots more people in it now.
$%*@)%#$.... I have not idea what happened there, but i must have missed the a close tag.... Divide and Rule.
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The OSS world is already quite divided and I've the feeling Microsoft is consolidating them (in the face of a threat) rather than diving them. Some marginal folks will always think up something weird but that's not so important.
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Excellent point except the main targets for a lawsuit are moving to GPL3, like Samba. Otherwise, the threats are mere threats, with no source code or anything except hot air backing them up. Microsoft will never bring this into court, they will merely attempt to create an air of hysteria, hoping people like yourself make a big deal out of it so they don't have to substantiate their claims. Much like the SCO case, we know how
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FUD may not be so far from the mark. Large corporations are fairly conservative and risk-averse entities. If you can sew the seed of doubt with the people who control the money, they may be leery about using Linux in their enterprise unless they have the soothing lie of being free from any patent encumberance. By signing thes
"Linux companies license our IP!" (Score:2)
Surveys (Score:3, Funny)
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You can't argue with science.
Alfresco never directly asked the Question (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing to do with rubbish marketing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Don't get on The List (Score:5, Interesting)
I would rather go with Redhat where there's far less confusion going on. They offer protection anyways, through OIN.
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Agreed. I personally don't run RH (I'm a Slackware/Debian user), but if I was choosing Linux for a company I'd go with the industry standard: Red Hat. Interesting to note that RH predicted that Novell would suffer as a result of the deal with MS. I think it is still too early to forecast the demise of Novell, but the survey results are interesting.
we dumped Novell on the patent deal. (Score:2, Interesting)
We used Suse way before Novell bought it, and the deal with Microsoft while good for the board of Novell fails in every other respect. Open means choice - not fud or payments to Microsoft for 'mob insurance'.
Instead of keeping Suse - we moved distro and yes we are happy. Move back to Novell ? - no thank you.
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Alfresco? (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry, I don't programme outdoors; I'm in my parents' basement!
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Score for Alfresco (Score:1)
So, why would trash like this get published on Slashdot instead of something actually interesting, like http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/novell-hac k-week-an-experiment-in-inn [arstechnica.com]
A note about statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
I recall that my statistics professor explicitly pointed out a common mistake in statistics: "Contrary to what people typically believe, the size of the sample is often not as critical as getting an unbiased sample." If you call the home phone number of people during daytime and ask the ones who answer whether they are employed or not, you will not get good statistics. Regardless if you reach 1 000 or 10 000 people.
I have no idea if there is such a problem with the statistics presented here. I just want to point out their claim of sample size can not be taken to mean that their statistics are better than Gallup's.
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"There are lies, damned lies, and Statistics"
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I have a very small dataset (Score:3, Interesting)
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PR Fluff & Unsupported conclusion (Score:3, Interesting)
"Alfresco did not specifically ask community members the reason for their Linux choice"
So we have a self selecting sample, from which they've drawn conclusions on an issue they didn't even ask about. We're also left in the dark as to how Redhat compared to the other distros (like, for instance, flavour of the month Ubuntu) in recent months. So we don't know if the supposed surge in Redhat is more down to Redhat itself than disapproval of SUSE.
My analysis; this report is insignificant PR fluff, to which some fanboy has added cherry picked data to "prove" a political point he wished to make regardless.
No Pasta... (Score:1)
release the weasels (Score:1)
Microsoft partners = free to attack them (Score:1)
But who cares, this is Microsoft's stupid marketing because
What about visability? (Score:2)
Post Hoc Fallacy (Score:1)
Event 2: Redhat has better sales than Novell
Conclusion: there is a backlash against Novell and is losing customers.
This a logical fallacy of the type "Post Hoc ergo propter Hoc", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter _hoc [wikipedia.org].
Because Redhat's increased sales happened after Microsoft/Novell deal, doesn't mean there is a fallout. I doubt that is the case especially among 'corporate' customers. It could've been just better and targeted marketing on the par
I'll drop any distro that signs with Microsoft (Score:1)
Microsoft opposes everything that Linux has come to stand for. Linux is the best OS on the planet and it's completely free. If Microsoft was ever able to gain control of it those ass hats would start selling CALS for Linux servers, OEM stickers for Linux workstations, and sue your ass off if you didn't buy them. If you give Microsoft an inch they will walk all ov