Posted by
Hemos
on from the getting-together dept.
_ZorKa_ writes "Yahoo.Com is running an article about the latest partnership of Red Hat and Eazel. The future versions of Red Hat will include Eazel's Nautilus software package. The idea is to use the software as a desktop interface which also automatically updates Linux."
Heading for consolidation
by
mfterman
·
· Score: 5
This development is nowhere near surprising. My personal feeling is that we're going to see far fewer Linux companies and distributions in the future, falling into three categories.
The first category will be Linux distributions that form out of the merger or shutting down of all the various commercial vendors. I know, this Red Hat/Eazel thing isn't a merger but I would not be surprised to see it turn into a merger eventually. We're already seeing buyouts and shutdown of rival Linux distributions. I honestly don't know how much room there is in the market for different commercial Linux distributions. I see room for at least two in each regional market more likely three, but probably not much more than three. And if things head in a certain direction, that third could be Microsoft.
The second one will be major hardware vendors going with their own Linux distribution. Vendors that sell specialized hardware or hardware with special functionality might well go with their own optimized version of Linux. A company that sells graphics workstations would quite likely ship a version of Linux with their own optimized drivers and all sorts of performance tuning to squeeze maximum performance out of the hardware. Or a company might decide that licensing costs from one of the above vendor are higher than the cost of doing it in house. Personally, I think it more likely they'll end up doing a customized version of a regular distribution, but some really exotic varients might need more.
The third category will be specialized distributions that are non-profit or serve niche markets. Debian will last until the heat death of the universe and will be the source from which all non-commercial distributions spring. There might also be distributions for ready-made beowulf clusters and so forth. I think more often than not they will be volunteer efforts or a minor division of some company making its fortune in other ways.
The first time will make its money off of support contracts and subscription auto-update features especially for things like security fixes. The second sort of company will be using Linux to sell hardware with minimal software development costs. The third category won't be trying to make money or won't view this as their main source of revenue.
The first category, in terms of investiment in Linux development, will be focusing on ease of installation and deinstallation as well as ease of use. The second category will tend to focus on driver development and hardware support. The third category will focus on either things that aren't viewed as commercially viable or at best niche categories of software.
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This development is nowhere near surprising. My personal feeling is that we're going to see far fewer Linux companies and distributions in the future, falling into three categories.
The first category will be Linux distributions that form out of the merger or shutting down of all the various commercial vendors. I know, this Red Hat/Eazel thing isn't a merger but I would not be surprised to see it turn into a merger eventually. We're already seeing buyouts and shutdown of rival Linux distributions. I honestly don't know how much room there is in the market for different commercial Linux distributions. I see room for at least two in each regional market more likely three, but probably not much more than three. And if things head in a certain direction, that third could be Microsoft.
The second one will be major hardware vendors going with their own Linux distribution. Vendors that sell specialized hardware or hardware with special functionality might well go with their own optimized version of Linux. A company that sells graphics workstations would quite likely ship a version of Linux with their own optimized drivers and all sorts of performance tuning to squeeze maximum performance out of the hardware. Or a company might decide that licensing costs from one of the above vendor are higher than the cost of doing it in house. Personally, I think it more likely they'll end up doing a customized version of a regular distribution, but some really exotic varients might need more.
The third category will be specialized distributions that are non-profit or serve niche markets. Debian will last until the heat death of the universe and will be the source from which all non-commercial distributions spring. There might also be distributions for ready-made beowulf clusters and so forth. I think more often than not they will be volunteer efforts or a minor division of some company making its fortune in other ways.
The first time will make its money off of support contracts and subscription auto-update features especially for things like security fixes. The second sort of company will be using Linux to sell hardware with minimal software development costs. The third category won't be trying to make money or won't view this as their main source of revenue.
The first category, in terms of investiment in Linux development, will be focusing on ease of installation and deinstallation as well as ease of use. The second category will tend to focus on driver development and hardware support. The third category will focus on either things that aren't viewed as commercially viable or at best niche categories of software.
Ways RPM is better than Debian:
.deb files
rpm -Va (validate packages)
PGP signing of packages
better CLI and GUI tools
apt-get dist-upgrade usually hoses my system
Ways Debian is better than RPM:
Kernel building is very easy
apt-get update
Multiple sources for
apt-get dist-upgrade (when it doesn't host my system)
I'll stick with Debian.