Red Hat Commentary on ABC 112
Vamphyri writes
"An ABC News correspondent
says the ``Linux market will, as promised, now be dominated
by RedHat's commercial success.'' which he goes on to say
is a good thing. The full story is here but
way down at bottom of page. " It actually offers one quite
interesting comment: Red Hat netted 10 million last year, and
devoted 20% of that to R&D. The IPO will raise almost $100M.
If they continue that trend, they will put $20M into Linux,
GNOME, and more. Interesting.
Re:Did YOU Get Anything Right? (Score:1)
This is not a given among intellectually honest people.
We are discussing the value of a specific article. The article contains major errors in logic and substance. His reputation in your eyes will no more cure that problem than Shockley's admirable technological achievements validated his racism.
Thanks for validating my objection to Anderson's clueless comments. It is odd that you present your concession as a rebuttal, but perhaps you didn't realize what you were doing.
Anderson says that the "open source freaks" were wrong to assume that support was a moneymaker for Red Hat. I say it was. You say the same thing.
Care to sit down and think through your argument again?
I notice you didn't have any problem with your colleague dumping on "open source freaks"...or if you did, you allowed your partisanship to override your honesty. For shame.
Anderson's crude baiting of the open-source community on the shakiest of grounds was an oafish act. It was inept, stupid, and wrong. Anderson is, therefore, an oaf.
If you want to elevate the debate, you can either:
Good luck with your decision.
--
How about an Open DVD standard? (Score:1)
Comparing # of processes. (Score:1)
First?? (accuracy--) (Score:1)
Please back up your assertion that *.rpm predates *.deb.
(The rest of your post seems concerned with GUIs such as GNOME.)
Red Hat in US New & World Report (Score:2)
redhat has always been commercial (Score:1)
Your "heuristic" is really an emotional problem: fear and envy of success.
I know it hurts, but let's think for a second. (Score:1)
Open Source implies that there is source code. How can you have source code to a piece of hardware?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:redhat has always been commercial (Score:1)
I think we can all do without the Ayn Rand-ian psychoanalysis. It is presumptuous and sophomoric.
It is not unreasonable to believe that public companies, as a general rule, behave differently than private ones. Instead of having a few relatively constant owners, upper management must answer to an ever-changing stream of owners who generally aren't in for the long haul, particularly in the age of the mutual fund. It seems perfectly natural to have concerns about the effect of an IPO on a company's priorities when you as a customer are deciding whether to invest your time and money in their product, since the future of that product is at stake.
While it may not make sense to dislike a company purely because they're large and/or publicly traded, it definitely doesn't make sense to act as if it doesn't matter at all and accuse anyone who believes otherwise of being a success-hating commie psychopath.
My suggestion to you, and you may take it for whatever it's worth, is to think about why a person says what he or she says, what legitimate concerns that person might have, and address those in a non-adversarial manner. Seek to educate rather than confront.
I mean, did you really think the person to whom you responded would say, "Hey, you're right! I do have an emotional problem regarding success. I'm going to get off Slashdot and make an appointment with a qualified mental health professional right now!"
Re:weird... (Score:1)
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
Of course the answer to this seems obvious to us - but this shows a worrying problem: the open-source community is perceived in the media as some kind of stubborn, obsessive, pedantic group of people spoiling for arguments.
I'm not saying that the open-source community (or whatever else you want to label it) is those things, and I'm not trying to attract flames. My point is that there is a damaging perception out there, and whatever the cause, it is an issue we will need to face if we want to give the corporate world a positive impression of the work the open-source community does.
Andrew.
Re:Money can't buy...give me a break (Score:1)
The rest of what you say is mostly FUD...I haven't had Gnome lock up in months...Enlightenment and Gnome work very nicely together. Don't get me wrong, there are improvements to be done but things are improving. If more people like you would stop complaining about problems with Gnome and start working on them most of the problems would be gone by now.
As it is you are doing nobody any good at all...thanks for nothing.
Re:Trustees etc. (Score:1)
Re:Responsible to shareholders? (Score:1)
"If their shareholders force them down that road, they'll just be making a mistake. Red Hat will loose revenue, and another distribution who has remained true to the open source model, will emerge as the top distribution."
Whereas I agree with your thought, I wonder how long it would take for another distrubution to rise to dominate. Chances are it would take some time - several years would be my guess.
The only danger... (Score:1)
go under, the media would immediately call
Linux DOA.
The media has a nack for making illogical and/or
unwarranted connections, and this could be
another case.
However, that would be like saying if Ford went
out of business that all cars were destined
for failure... hmm.
That's the impression I got by the author saying
that RedHat would "dominated by RedHat's success".
It could also be linked with its failure.
P.S. - I'm not saying RedHat will fail. I'm a
6.0 user, and love what they're doing for Linux.
Re:Responsible to shareholders? (Score:1)
Linux will survive as a free alternative OS even if a forked non-free version does become the standard in the business world, after all most of us use it for reasons other than that it is the standard OS (which, of course it isn't yet). It would be a shame to see things turn this ugly, I'm hoping they won't.
dave
it wouldn't be open then (Score:1)
For example, Debian doesn't classify mySQL as "open" because the mySQL license contains restrictions for use under windows, even though use in a unix environment is unrestricted. The same logic would apply to restrictions on which distribution your code could be run on.
Re:Did YOU Get Anything Right? (Score:3)
First off, yeah, I work for the same site, so of course I'm going to defend Mark. But even if I didn't work for ABC, Mark's crystal ball is one of the better ones in this unpredictable biz.
People buying Linux WILL buy RedHat over the $1.99 version, and I'll tell you why: RedHat's customers are major corporations, and they want the support that comes with paying $80. Sure, YOU can go download it for free, but as Linux gets adopted into the mainstream IT market, you can bet that IT managers will pay RedHat for the support. Sure, it's questionable whether RH will make its main bucks off of support, but it makes IT people happier to pay for it. So much the better for everyone.
And calling someone an oaf isn't exactly elevating the debate to the next level, now is it?
Re:Why Red Hat's business model works (Score:1)
Re:Redhat & the suits (Score:1)
Now, now...we're not all that slow. (Well, some of us are.) It's just that we have other priorities. Come on, folks, there are lots of people in the world who don't have the time or interest to look into every fad (tech or otherwise) that goes around. It's a workable sorting mechanism to ignore things until they've hung around long enough to prove that they have a lifespan longer than a mayfly.
There are clued corp types that have been reserving judgment on linux as a corp infrastructure, for good reasons...fortunately, many of the events of the past year have helped immeasureably in building acceptability in the corp sector.
So be happy, things are looking up...although as the posts on this Redhat article show, there are plenty of people who will be upset once linux is well accepted in the corp world, to counterbalance the people who are upset because it isn't accepted...
RedHat made $$ off SERVICE. (Score:1)
Mark Anderson seems to have a severely limited understanding of the business model that RedHat operates under.
Did they make money off boxed sales? Sure!
Guess what. The releases from RedHat are SERVICES.
What? Services? How do you figure?
You could go with Slackware and/or assemble 99.999% of what you find in a RedHat distribution on your own.
RedHat provides the pre-packaging of the distribution for you (that's the point of a distribution). Guess what. That makes it a service. Yes they value-added some things. But the majority of the code under RH Linux was provided by countless unpaid programmers for the betterment of the operating system as a whole.
They're no different from Walnut Creek in selling their CD's of the CDROM.com archive. They merely provided packaging.
The childish "Take that you open-source freaks" was the mark of a man who has little better to do with his time than come up with witty, inane (not to mention one-sided) one liners. Sort of like when a person rehashes an argument they lost, saying all the things the wish they'd had the backbone to say in-person.
It's disappointing that a so-called journalist has to sink to such infantile practice as this to try to cover for his deficient comprehension of the issue.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:we actually do not disagree...i think (Score:1)
Re:RedHat forking the standard base (Score:1)
if they fork the standard base then they probably won't follow the LSB and that will fall in this category but you are right to point this out.
This is also the great strenght of Linux over *BSD on the political/practical plan.
First we are sure that the only way to take Linux into a proprietary OS is to fight the GPL in court (their can be proprietary code on top of the OS but the main parts are open source).
Second the GPL license seem to prevent code forking more efficiently than the BSD license. Ok their was the Emacs/XEmacs fork and the GCC/EGCS fork (which resolved gracefully BTW) but these seems to be exception.
Maybe the BSD forks are exception too (don't know enough about them) but they are more profound. People are fearing that Linux will split up in many incompatible version but we already have FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and BSD/OS. They are 3 different OSes, not three different distros (although they must have a good part of code in common still). I suppose the compatibility between them is pretty good at least on the source level but they still are different as would 3 Linux-derived OS be different.
This may also be an argument against this kind of fear. If *BSD though different are compatible enough because they are open source then this is more likely to happen to Linux if he split (althoug if Linux split it would be more of a result of commercial pressures and may make it harder to maintain a good level of compatibility).
Ok, much more long that what I thought (and less constructed, as usual
Buisnesses Beware (Score:1)
--
Re:First?? (accuracy--) (Score:1)
Anyway, that doesn't really change my main point, which was that having one dominant vendor, even with open source products, can lead to distortions in the market place, similar to what happened with the Macintosh vs. Windows desktops, where the best product doesn't necessarily win. RedHat's sponsorship of Gnome is going to give Gnome an advantage in the Unix desktop competition that has nothing to do with its merit.
------------------------------
Re:Uber-GPL? (Score:1)
Redhat (Score:2)
what would they fund? (Score:1)
$20,000,000 is a lot of cash - I wonder if how they would use it?
More inhouse staff or perhaps funding remote access specialist hardware - eg a 4 way Xeon server with 1Gb of main memory and 4 network cards?
Just as a random selection *grin*
Tom
Linux does not depend on Red Hat. (Score:2)
I could be mistaken, but doesn't this line seem to imply that linux depends on Red Hat and that linux is nothing without red hat? I think red hat has and will do good things for linux, but linux existed before red hat and I believe it will exist after it too.
More clueless ramblings (Score:1)
*sigh* Yet another daft article by someone who thinks that the GPL means Free Beer instead of Free Speech. Is it really such a complicated concept that no journalist is capable of understanding it?!
dylan_-
--
Guaranteed 20%-of-revenue RnD spending (Score:2)
Redhat is cool.
He also... (Score:1)
See, they arnt that bad! (Score:1)
weird... (Score:4)
first he berates people who think redhat will make it's money from support, but then suggests redhat will need to diversify from just box sales. i agree with the last part, but their box sales *do* include support, and what is he suggesting they diversify to? i'm thinking support...
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
what i find *more* interesting is that redhat isn't just going against the conventional wisdom, it's exacting cruel and unusual punishment against the conventional wisdom.
cw: linux companies will just take and not give back.
reality: redhat gives back with a 20% r&d budget.
cw: in order to do well companies must protect i.p..
reality: all of redhat's code is gpl'ed.
cw: if a company *did* give back and it's code *was* gpl'ed (yeah, right) the free s/w community would love them.
reality: a vocal group (big? small? who knows.) continually speak against them.
cw: product companies must lose gobs of cash first.
reality: redhat's lost less then half a million since it's inception.
cw: it won't work.
reality: it's growing.
at this point the cw just rings up the aclu and requests legal assistance.
btw, the answer to the tough question: if it doesn't suck, yes.
Responsible to shareholders? (Score:1)
Of course, RH might set limits as to how much control others might be able to gain over the company. Let's hope so.
dave
Re:Linux does not depend on Red Hat. (Score:2)
Of course, this means absolutely nothing
Re:He also... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
forget the RH FUD, watch out for the cell phones (Score:1)
but what worried me more was the subheading immediately above the linux story, telling that the cellular industry had finally admitted that cell phones cause brain cancer. how disturbing... for one, my roommate just signed up for cellular service, and two, what will happen to scully and mulder?
Re:Responsible to shareholders? (Score:1)
Trustees etc. (Score:2)
RH has a wonderful opportunity to raise funds for itself and to further the linux community through investment and exposure. It would be a shame to see Llib Setag in some position of authority, simply because he bough a gazillion shares.
Re:Linux Networking blows (Score:1)
Which company? I want to know so I don't invest in any stock you might have. You've got the computer equivalent of a mono-agricultural farm. Can't solve something and have to upgrade to Win2000? Ooops. That open up other problems? Oops. Had to upgrade your hardware? Oops.
We discovered that being able to put 2 100Mbit eathernet cards in each Workstation and 4 on the server gave us several times the performace that the Linux server (by the wasy was twice as powerfull in CPU Mhz than the NT server ) gave us.
What's your name? Gotta know it so I don't end up making a mistake and hiring you since you don't seem to have considered any other free (and even commercial) unix. I don't like people with arrogant, one-dimensional, "I implemented it and hence I'm right" attitude. Bad team player.
Who knows one day this may change but until then I don't see us switching any time soon.
Neither do I.
And since our network is firewalled ( FW-1 ) then we don't have any security problems to worry about. Not even Viruses cuz they are stoped at the Firewall.
Uhhh....yeah. Right. I love people like you. You screw up, people like me get called it, we get to paid.
Please, give me at least then name of the company. I think I'm going to have some free cash when RH's stock shoots up to invest in some less volatile, slow growing companies. I want to be sure you're not on my list (and if it were, bad me, I need to do more research).
One thing I'd like to have out of this ... (Score:1)
I'm tired of having FUD come out, people bitch about it, and the media running the piece doesn't get a correction update about where they were wrong.
Re:Responsible to shareholders? (Score:1)
Wow, what an idea. We become shareholders and thus begin getting money back for all the GPL software we produce (sort of). I could dig that. Now if I can just remember where I have all that extra money lying around set aside for stock investments
dave
Re:Linux Networking blows (Score:1)
> something as simple as bind 4-8 eathernet cards
> together to create one fat pipe is beond me.
Why anyone would want to use an OS that doesn't quite seem to quite "get" large portions of the TCP/IP spec is beyond me.
But yeah, binding the ethernet cards to the same IP like that is a nice feature. Although I find myself wondering how that works without severely mangling ARP/RARP...
[ nitpick: there's no 'a' in "ethernet" ]
> In NT you can do that in under 10 mouse clicks.
> Ahahahaha No waite 7 mouse clicks.
If this is such a large site, you've got some kind of automated setup procedure for these servers and workstations, right? I can't imagine having to walk around to each and every machine and execute 10 or 7 or even 5 mouse clicks...
[ nitpick: wait is spelled W-A-I-T, and you're missing some punctuation ]
> I work for a Fortune 100 company and we did our
> owne in house benchmarks on VT vs. Linux and
> that's why we now are 100% NT+NTworkstation. We
> discovered that being able to put 2 100Mbit
> eathernet cards in each Workstation and 4 on the
> server gave us several times the performace that
> the Linux server (by the wasy was twice as
> powerfull in CPU Mhz than the NT server ) gave
> us.
I won't ask what you people are doing that requires this kind of bandwith, since you're obviously only concerned with peak throughput...
...but let me get this straight: in a situation where the main bottleneck is network I/O, you're deriding Linux networking because of performance comparisons between a Linux server with one NIC, and an NT server with four?
I trust you are aware that you can take advantage of multiple network interfaces even without binding them to the same IP? (and in fact you can get some additional advantages there, if you're clever about switched ethernet and routing)
Also, you _did_ use the same client configuarations for both tests, didn't you?
[ nitpick: no 'e' in "own". and there's no 'a' in "ethernet" ]
> And since our network is firewalled ( FW-1 )
> then we don't have any security problems to
> worry about. Not even Viruses cuz they are
> stoped at the Firewall.
I assume you mean proxy+firewall, not just firewall. I sincerely hope that you're not in any way responsible for security at your site; this is an extremely naive attitude.
Firewalls don't magically make your network secure by themselves (yes, they _help_, but...). Crackers like networks with a hard candy shell and a soft, gooey center. You want to be giving the bastards jawbreakers to suck on instead. Preferably jalapeno flavor.
[ nitpick: the plural of Virus is Virii. I'll overlook the informal "cuz". "stopped" has two p's. ]
[ self-nitpick: I'm missing the accents in naive and jalapeno ]
It's a good thing you didn't reveal what corporation you work for; your post does not exactly scream professionalism.
---
Re:Slashdot doesn't (Score:1)
Slashdot users tend not to understand it, believing every thing should be handed to them.
So you say...so some others say. I haven't seen any evidence of this though. RedHat obviously do sell a good number of boxes, despite the availability of cheap/free versions.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I believe in this myth of the Typical Slashdot Reader. Most slashdot readers don't even post comments.
dylan_-
--
Re:Responsible to shareholders? (Score:1)
if people choose to invest, they accept that plan. seems simple to me.
Re:Actually (Score:1)
-ponty
Uber-GPL? (Score:2)
Damn... you mean if I write some GPL'd code, I'm bound by the GPL to reveal all details of every aspect of my professional life? This thing really is a strong license...
Duh.
Re:Fellow Freaks (Score:1)
On a lighter note. This ZDNet Article [zdnet.com] is also in reference to the Redhat IPO. IMHO It is far superior to the ABC News article.
Vamphyri
Control is not a requirement for power. (Score:1)
I would be very concerned that project may be cometing on marketing, not on merit. Even between two projects where Redhat has no interest, whichever one is distributed with RedHat gets more exposure, and how many "official rollouts" will specify "no third party (non-redhat signed) software) ?
Remember, infulence is like money in the bank, the less you use it, the more you have. With Redhat releasing everything (currently) under the GPL, and going public, that's a lot of influence piling up. What happens if they every try to cash in on that account?
--
Re:Guaranteed 20%-of-revenue RnD spending (Score:1)
Even OpenBSD is easier (by *FAR*) to install than Debian.
Oh, well... time for my own distro...
Or something...
--Corey
Re:You are missing the point (Score:1)
We have the chance that the major Linux distro is releasing all his code under GPL or another open license (for code they contribute to project that already had other licenses) so I will wait until they do something that will prove that they want to be the Microsoft of linux before criticising them on their size.
About something that will prove...(see above) i don't count marketing because this is necessary to any company that want to sell his products, they only have their name, don't forget it. But I count releasing code to an non-open license (no, selling other people products like Motif don't count either, they don't devellop it) or seeking agreements with company to port their products only to Redhat Linux (impossible until they release some proprietary stuff). the CodeWarrior buzz don't count because this is originated from Metrowerks and CodeWarrior can function under other distros. But if RedHat don't abid to the LSB (Linux Standard Base) when it come out (supposing this will be a good standard base) I will count it as something bad (i.e. not willing to share their dominant market share).
and if ever I switch to another distro I will avoid any distro that ship some proprietary code (installer, configuration tool...) and probably will go Debian.
Redhat IPO's don't count either, not until they do something bad will I critisize them on being too big... Ok if their was 2 commercial distros left because Redhat won the distro war being fair (which i doubt, they still will be a great choice i think) i probably will support the other one, but their is still some time before this is the case.
Outpost.com (offtopic) (Score:1)
--
Re:This guy is 100% right. (Score:1)
er no...
linux can utilize 4+ eth cards, you just need
to give it a boot-time parameter that you have them
check the Ethernet-HOWTO
and I am not surprised it took a while to have the 50 clients set up when there was 1/4 the available net bandwidth...
Re:How about an Open DVD standard? (Score:1)
DVD is not perfect; outside of theology (including Deep Physics), nothing is. But DVD has incredible potential for data interchange, as well as its obvious / not-so-obvious capacity for music and video.
DVD-18 (double-sided, double-layer -- DSDL) discs can hold up to 8 hours of video with --from memory, corrections invited -- 17 GB of data.
DSDL discs are difficult to manufacture and are as yet very uncommon, so they're not the best examples, perhaps, but even single-sided discs hold Gigabytes on a neat little platter.
DVD-ROM drives play CD-ROMs fine (though with reputedly mixed results on CD-R and CD-RW, due to the interactions of dye-colors and laser wavelengths), so backward compatibility is not a problem.
The main difference is, with a full-capacity DVD, you could have as much data as on more than 25 CD-ROMs! You could try out slackware, red hat, debian, yellow dog, turbo linux and many more
Commerical software houses are probably going to expand on the old idea of sending a disc and selectively unlocking individual pieces of it.
DVD will be around for a long time, and Linux will start to age prematurely if no Open DVD standard emerges. It may take cooperation from the companies who make DVD hardware (and their standards consortia), but as Linux becomes more and more of an Obvious Choice, it would be silly if they didn't recognize that they could be selling their hardware to millions of users, if only those users could use DVDs on their systems.
Just some thoughts,
timothy
p.s. And of course, you could try out that "scientifically interesting" multi-angle DVD video you borrowed from your roommate. (Hint: the scientific company with the most multi-angle titles is Vivid Video [vivid.com])
Re:It makes business sense to fund R&D (Score:1)
And even though I love my command line, the mainstream wishes for instant GUI... its what they expect and eventually will receive. Just a cosmetic face lift on installation and 'bootup' and thats all that would be needed.
-Mishrak
This guy sees contradiction where there is none. (Score:1)
- That making money is anti-opensource.
- He seems to believe that the fact that Redhat sells a box in stores prevents people from downloading the release for free.
- That the following two sets of people are identical sets:
In the words of the immortal Bugs, "What a Maroon!".- { people who told him Redhat will only make money from support and services }
- { Opensource advocates }
(There is certainly much overlap in those sets, in fact the first set might be entirely contained within second. But they are not the same set, and thus proving the first set of people wrong does not prove the second set wrong.)"...a new software business model." (Score:4)
However, the author correctly recognizes that Linux is becoming a success in the commercial/corporate world, and Red Hat's business activity is largely responsible for bringing Linux to the attention of the typical clueless pointy-haired corporate computer-illiterate weasel who has, interestingly enough, been put in charge of making decisions regarding OS deployment.
This recognition is a GOOD THING!
Those above-mentioned "pointy-hairs" are getting it, that every line of software on the planet WAS NOT written by Microsoft.
And Red Hat has done much to foster this education of the masses.
I read lots of flaming about the quality of Red Hat's contributions to the software environment that makes up Linux. I would remind those doing such flaming that every single character of code written by Red Hat has been released under the GPL. Don't like what they wrote? Fix it! Take their source and make a better version. This is what the GPL is all about. Software by the people and for the people.
I'm thrilled at Red Hat's success, because it represents the success of a company who seems to have genuinely embraced the open source model of doing things.
All in all, I think this was a good, concise little blurb reporting the state of things at Red Hat.
Next question: if RedHat put $20 million into R&D on Linux, would the Linux community accept these source code modifications? The result would be a new software business model.
"...a new software business model."
Damn straight! and about time.
Re:Redhat (Score:1)
What he means by "new software business model" is that linux is a viable software alternative for businesses (duh... like we didn't already know that!). The reason he says "new" is because, to be brutaly honest, the corporate world is very slow on the uptake. Just look at how long it has taken them to even consider linux... now that it is being considered it will be a few more years before any in-roads are really made.
Here is Taxachusetts we have a saying that I think fits in well with these people... "Light dawns on Marblehead"
Re: Linux vs. Market (Score:1)
RedHat is definitely a leader in the "market" part of Linux. Not "THE" leader, but "A" leader. I tried to introduce linux somewhereas, and I gave them a choice of RedHat and Debian. 9 out of 10 users who wanted Linux chose RedHat to be installed on their boxes, because it seemed nicer (RH5.2 vs Deb2.0).
However, this guy does not realize that RedHat also invests into more of the market, not us, mere mortal linux zealots. I cannot see myself jumping to use GNOME that much (except gnomine), just because my system is stable and easy enough without it. I have struggled for over 2 years, but now I am comfortable doing everything I want withough a flashy window manager. FVWM2 without themes is just fine. Same goes for most linux users I know. GNOME and KDE have the drag and drop feature which I'd like to have sometimes but mostly in Office-like applications which ARE market applications. Those are not the same as what I use at home. They wouldn't be even if I used WordPerfect to type up my papers.
Let me correct myself before you flame my post, RedHat also invests into X and the kernel (by employing Alan Cox, etc). I respect that. I am happy that they are ethical enough to donate money towards something that they get for free (the kernel). Thus it is a good thing. After all, I wouldn't want the kernel I run to be done by Linus if he was sweating over his keyboard for 12 hours a day programming a database, like I do, and then going home to release patches. The kernel is a FULL-TIME JOB, and people SHOULD get paid for it. RedHat is nice enough to make that happen. Debian is just not able to do that since they themselves live on donations.
As long as RedHat realizes they must support Linux to make money on Linux market, everything should be fine. No matter what journalists like this one say. RedHat dominates the shelves in the Linux section of CompUSA, but not the heart of developers out there. And RedHat directors are fine with it because they make money thanks to those developers.
That is really big of them. Most corporations, like a certain one whose name will be Microsoft, try to force developers into their own paradigm of the OS market. That is just wrong, and I believe will fail as a business model in a decade or so. That is if we survive the Y2K bug! 8)
Later,
Misha.
P.S. I am not an expert, I am a student. Reply with constructive criticism, not flames. I am not writing this for the outrageous name-calling.
red hat ipo and the new money (Score:1)
I personally think all this is great. I doubt redhat though will make a 20 mil contribution to research though. They'll probably make a sizeable contribution, but not that much. Would you, when there are so many people out there doing redhat research? If I'm wrong and they do put in a lot of money it may go to new software that they CAN sell.
Re:Responsible to shareholders? (Score:2)
IMHO Red Hat's success thus far is largely due to the fact that they have embraced the Open Source/GPL model.
They offer something other than the closed, proprietary stuff that the corporate world has seen plenty of.
As soon as they start closing up their code and becoming proprietary, they become just another nameless proprietary software company.
They are successful because they are not that.
If their shareholders force them down that road, they'll just be making a mistake. Red Hat will loose revenue, and another distribution who has remained true to the open source model, will emerge as the top distribution.
Did This Guy Get Anything Right? (Score:1)
Mark Anderson makes several claims in his article, and by my reckoning he gets them all dead wrong.
First, he asserts that the market success of Red Hat's $80 boxed distribution implies that their revenue comes from software rather than sales. This is difficult to justify in view of the fact that the same software is sold for $1.99 by Cheapbytes. The difference between the boxed set and the Cheapbytes disk is some rather unhelpful manuals -- and support. Anderson's own evidence gives him the lie.
He also asserts that Red Hat funding Linux development would be "a new software business model". I disbelieve. Red Hat's success is the validation of the very theory that Anderson professes to hate: the open source business model.
Tahe that, Anderson, you closed-source oaf.
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I nominate Linux Weekly News (Score:1)
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Re:Actually (Score:1)
It is widely assumed that Linus is working on some type of Microprocessor, or something else along the lines of computer architechture (given rumors flying about Transmeta, and the fact that Linus like that kind of stuff). How exactly does one "reveal the source he is working on". Assuming it is some sort of Microprocessor, they'll almost certainly reveal the ISA.
Re:what would they fund? (Score:1)
Christopher A. Bohn
Drain Bamage (was: Re:Buyers beware) (Score:1)
There's nothing wrong with selecting Debian (or Caldera or S.U.s.E. or Red Hat or TurboLinux or...) but do so based on at least a little intellectual reasoning.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, "People who think and act like this should go back to the dark side where they belong."
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Re:that was lame (Score:1)
Scully and Mulder? The brain damage is done :) (Score:1)
Official Red Hat Support? (Score:1)
And calling someone an oaf isn't exactly elevating the debate to the next level, now is it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, here, but isn't the support that comes with the purchase of an Official Red Hat copy just for install support? Granted, you can purchase additional support from Red Hat [redhat.com] for extra ducats, just like you can for that other company. But if I'm not scanning blank sectors, the "support with the official version" is just for installation support.
Therefore, what is the benefit of purchasing more than one "official" copy of the RH distro? So you just buy one copy and REALLY get your money's worth out of the RH Install Support team.
And you are correct: Name-calling is not elevating the debate to the next level.
Geordon
Why Red Hat's business model works (Score:1)
Recently Slashdot had an article about software piracy. A number of slashdotters said how that most who pirate software, would not have bought it otherwise.
I think that is true with Red Hat. Most people who use Red Hat, wouldn't use Red Hat if they had to pay. But there are many who do pay, to support what Red Hat is doing.
Sorta like AOL disks. Well, not exactly like AOL disks, but similar. Give out the software for free, let it penetrate the market. In software industry, the more people who use software, the even more people who use the software. Im going to make a guess and say that the people who pay for Red Hat is proportional to the people who don't pay. So, by giving the software free and keeping the quality high of their distro, they get many people using it and more people paying for Red Hat Linux.
This works, because in my judgment, their are more newbies buy Linux than people already familiar to it. When the ratio changes, however, we won't be screwed though. Then the distrobutions will need to make money off of people upgrading their distrobutions. Even if Linux monopolizes the market, we will have numerous distros, trying to compete for market. Just think how much better the world would be if there were multiple distributions of Windows. The competition would raise software quality sky high and their would be a distribution for each niche of the market.
I can dream, can't I?
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Re:Oooooh, you really hit on something (Score:1)
As far as component programming goes, I partially agree with you there. I don't know where all this stuff (CORBA, etc.) will go. I'm hopeful, however. The STL is a resuable set of components that I use every day. That demonstrates that resuable components are at least possible, if not common.
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It makes business sense to fund R&D (Score:1)
If Joe User's video card doesn't work or if Widgets-R-Us can't get Linux using their VME backplane, they'll switch back to windows98 or LynxOS, no matter how heavily they've marketed themselves. For RH to succeed, they need to have a continually improving product. If the rest of the OS community doesn't provide the software they need, it makes sense for them to do it themselves. It's a lot cheaper to improve the product when you can rely on improvement that other contributors have made. RH and the Linux community could get a HUGE bang for their R&D buck (compared to closed-source R&D). Things improve a whole lot faster in the OS world than in the proprietary world.
RH relies on the OS movement so they aren't going to be able to go proprietary on us. We'd cut them off if they did. Hell we've come close to slaying MS, RH would be a piece of cake (since their entire product is owned by us). Besides, they know that if we they give to us, we will give back to them. People trust RH and they provide a valuble service. If they want new and expanding markets:
use that money to develop new drivers.
Create a driver developer kit and documentation for vendors.
Write some good books or start some education programs
Write the author. (Score:3)
>> Most interesting of all: despite all this talk about getting revenues from services and tech support, virtually all of the company's revenues to date have come from box sales. (Take that, open-source freaks.)
I don't understand why you attack the open-source movement.
First, RedHat software has contributed megabytes of source to the Linux community. This will, in all likelyhood, continue as it has in the past.
Second, Linux will remain freely available. Even RedHat's "version" will still be available for download, free of charge. It will also be available on low cost CD, produced by other companies (look at www.linuxmall.com or www.cheapbytes.com). Anyone can take any particular distribution of Linux (or create their own) and sell it themselves.
I use RedHat Linux 5.2. I purchased it from RedHat because I believe in what they are doing. However, I did this because I wanted to. I wasn't forced to purchase it. I encourage all people who use RedHat software to purchase it from them, to give them some recognition for the work they've put into it. What I feel you are really paying for is support, should you need it. At this point, I haven't needed any more help than I can find in the Linux How-Tos.
I wish RedHat all the best and hope they do become profitable. This would prove that OSS (Open Source Software) does have a place in mainstream software markets. It also might take us somewhere closer to the realization that this "real business model" you talk about isn't the only way to do things.
Money can't buy you everything - see Fred Brooks (Score:4)
But, remember Brooks' (sp?) law -- Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. Or, pouring more money into an ill-conceived project (Gnome, Windows) just makes it bigger, and bloatier. Through shear brute-force effort you may be able to patch most of the obvious bugs , but you won't have a stable, maintainable, extendable system without starting from scratch with a cleaner architecture.
Gnome is an ill-conveived system. It's architecture was thrown together in haste, and many of it's most praised features, like "window manager independence" were in fact just spin on the fact that they hadn't thought things through. "Language independence" means that they coded everything in the lowest common denominator, "C". They have not acheived true language independence through Corba, yet. Object-oriented programming works very well in gui programming. Although object-oriented programming is possible in languages that don't directly support it (witness Motif, Gtk), just as it's possible to program in a procedural style using assembly, it's a lot easier to do object-oriented programming in languages that support object-oriented programming. Again, if you want true language independence, use CORBA.
But, Gnome's failure wouldn't be a big deal if it were just one of among many desktop attempts. Darwinism, letting the best code win, is one of the open source model's strengths. You get some duplication of effort, sure, but that effort doesn't usually waste much money since it's programmers working on their own time. In Gnome's case, however, RedHat is unlikely just to drop it and use something else. They have too much money invested in it. So, RedHat will continue pushing Gnome in the media, and will still be the default desktop environment in their distribution. Even though it's inferior. This will hamper the development of end user applications for Linux, since Gnome is an awkward system to write for. Of course developers could just write for KDE, or wxWindows (which wraps Gtk nicely), or whatever, but they can't ignore default desktop environment on the dominant distribution if they want their apps to be widely used. Gnome is already slowing down end-user acceptance of Linux. If Joe User walks into Best-Buy to buy Linux, he'll probablly pick up RedHat. He'll probablly also use Gnome as his windowing environment, since that's what comes up by default. He'll probablly also get really frustrated when Gnome locks up, when he finds out he has two control panels to worry about (Enlightenment's and Gnomes), etc.
In spite of all this, I still think RedHat has done many great things for the community. I just think that we're sticking our heads in the sand if we deny the fact that there are some down sides to RedHat's dominence (in the U.S., at least).
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Where RedHat's Revenue Comes From (Score:1)
comes from box sales ("take that open source
freaks").
Funny, I thought virtually all of redhat's revenue
comes from Linux (and the sweat of unpaid
thousands). Let's face it: RedHat is primarily
a service company and the service they provide
is putting together useful distributions and
testing them. They also do a fair amount of
code cutting too but that's not why I buy RH: I
buy it for the months of effort it would take to
put together my own GNU/Linux configuration.
He uses RedHat as an example of why the OS
movement is bogus but they actually are living
proof that you don't need to "own" the code to make money off it!