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Ask Robert Young
Yes, that Bob Young. The one who helped endow online information resource ibiblio.org, but is better known for his role as co-founder and Chairman of Red Hat. Ask him anything you want, but please hold it down to one question per post. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated inquiries to Bob (who is in England this week), and he'll send back his answers just as soon as he can.
This is something that's been bothering me for years. During installation, in the network setup portion, WHY does Redhat insist that a hostname is of the form mycomputer.mydomain.com?
That is what you call a fully qualified domain name NOT a hostname. The RFC states that the hostname is only the "leftmost portion" of the fully qualified domain name. Hence, hostname -fqdn. For godsakes can you please have someone fix that? We're Linux geeks, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.What are the difficulties you have faced in trying to get the business community to embrace your OS solutions? How do you answer the business communties questions regarding support issues?
As is well known and well documented, Windows (in any of its incarnations) is not the best OS the world has ever seen. However, one of the largest factors we all agree on re: it's market monopoly is the huge number of software titles avaibable for the windows platform.
I'm not sure why, but getting developers to write for Linux seems to be like pulling teeth... I wonder very much why this should be. Linux is superiour in every facet to Windows... the number of tools and toolkits available for the platform is huge. Yet still, the number of titles available is small.
Given the importance of and need for more commercial software, what if anything can/will Redhat do the increase the amount of commercial software available for the Redhat platform itself, and Linux in general?
Funny that you mention it...
Point your FTP client to here: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/sparc/7.1/iso/
5 ISO images of the new SuSE 7.1 for your Sparc.
Enjoy,
Hetz (Heunique)
So, what's your second favorite distribution?
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
If that were the case, both Chinese planes would have crashed and China would force the US to accept its spy plane back.
Why does Red Hat ship with so many services running as a default? This is the main (but not the only) reason that Red Hat is considered insecure, since so many new users are not even aware that these services are running. Also, are there any plans to create a hardened version of Red Hat (similar to OpenBSD)?
Do you have any intention of packaging WINE into a version of Red Hat targetted specifically for Windows users?
It would seem to me that this would be the optimum method to drive Windows off the desktop - especially as their liscensing becomes more restrictive.
A recent comment here from a Red Hat employee indicated that ReiserFS would not be included in the installation process. The reason for this decision was the lack of mature user-level tools for filesystem repair. This was the case of the last beta, although I don't know if you have changed your plans.
This is a sound argument, but sometimes it seems to me that Red Hat is rather reluctant to advance its distribution in certain areas, i.e. RH7 still lacks a 2.4 kernel.
Red Hat has influence, but not control, of technologies in the kernel and user space. Will Red Hat grow to be more receptive of technologies that are not a perfect fit with the architecture of your Linux distribution?
Please explain the significance and what you expect to be the outcome of the recent lawsuit that has been filed against your company.
Is it continuing to improve KDE and GNOME?
Or some server tool (maybe an Exchange server clone)?
Or is there nothing that urgently needs to improve?
I don't have the hardware to try it on, but you can get Debian/SPARC on CD I've used the Debian/PPC distribution for over a year now, and have been really liking it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Q: How do you see these acquisitions as helping Red Hat and its position in the market?
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
The problem is that even if you save $100 per workstation by moving to Linux the cost of retraining people to use it and the productivity they lose while they learn will be over $100 per user. (Assuming 10 hrs of ramp up time at $12/hr and that is for low level workers). And retrainint will be nessary even if you do not have formal classes if you put a totaly new type of computer infront of someone you have to assume that it will take them some time to figure out how to do all of the things that they need to do to do their jobs.
Now I think there could be some very big wins for Linux on the desktop, but the pure outlay cost is not one of them. Less downtime and better security. And being able to replace a dead workstation quicly all would be pluses for Linux however.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
This isn't true. I have an iMac running Debian GNU/Linux with no MacOS. MkLinux required a proprietary MacOS extension to boot but the monolithic kernel boots just fine on its own. You tell Open Firmware where the bootloader (yaboot) is and it goes from there.
Mr. Young I want to buy the following services from RedHat.
.iso images of new RedHat Linux releases. Again, I'm going to download this once, burn a CD, and install as needed.
.iso CD's mailed to me as new versions come out. I don't need anything in the envelope except a CD. Perhaps RedHat could partner with Cheapbytes to sell this to me so I can get all of my Linux software needs from one vendor???
1. I want to pay for the right to download updates. I know you have a product that offers this (RHN). But I don't want to pay per machine. Instead I want to pay per download stream. In other words, I'm going to download updates _once_ from RedHat and then distribute those locally. It would be helpful (read - I'd pay more!) if RedHat wrote software to facilitate the local distribution, but it isn't completely necessary.
2. I'd also like to download
3. As an option, I'd like to have
How soon can I buy this from RedHat?
Bob,
What is your take on Mac OS X ?
html format:
http://www.rpmdp.org/rpmbook/
among other places. do a web search.
b.c.
rlogin? you are kidding, right? you do know that anyone who uses rlogin is basically walking around screaming "take my passwords, please!" Kudos to RH for their quite secure workstation install... in 7.1, it'll even do a firewall for you. Good for them...
IAAL,BIANLY
What's in it for him is control over his data. The question is, should you sacrifice freedom for convenience?
If not, either use free software, or just go back to pen and paper.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Damned humourless moderators. Grow a sense of humour.
No, I'm actually Canada. But thanks for asking.
I was going to ask "what is your favourite recipe for ketchup", but you beat me to it.
As much respect I have for Alan Cox, one man does not an R&D team make. Do you know how many millions MS puts into "pure" R&D?
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Granted, a fair percentage of that is "filler" for MS to spend money on in preparation for future cuts to make the numbers better, but regardless of that: 16%!!!
That's quite a percentage. For example, GM R&D was $6.6 billion in 2000 on $184 billion in revenues, or 3% of operations.
Is RedHat going to be the MS of Linux? Not unless they spend money on R&D -- and is that money down the tubes, considering the nature of Free software? That's what I'd like to hear Bob's opinion on...
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hi Bob!
My question to you is, when you allocate part of your budget to R&D, are you in fact cutting your own throat? (How's that for a loaded question?)
To expand, why should I use a RedHat distribution, since it mainly isn't terribly different from a SuSE, Debian, or Caldera, unless RedHat has something that the others don't.
But, RedHat can't develop a major system enhancement within large portions of the OS because of the nature of Free software. RedHat can only develop a proprietary userland applications (which, granted, isn't all that bad -- it leaves you plenty of room for powerful applications) because any major system enhancement that RedHat develops can almost immediately be absorbed by your "competitors". Thus, the profit-motive is significantly depressed (if not removed) from pure R&D.
I understand that RedHat doesn't make significant revenues from OS sales -- I ask the question in terms of bugetary policy within the company and how it may (or may not) affect the decision-making process.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
What was the most important decision for Red Hat, through its history, apart from deciding to IPO? Was there a particular partnership, hire, technical call or anything else which defined the future for Red Hat?
What is RedHat going to do, if anything, to establish a relationship with small VARs so that it can get a chance at making inroads into the already established UNIX-on-Intel installed-base? Are you going to target small and medium sized VARs or will RedHat do their usual unfortunate thing of overcharging the VARs just to be a "member?"
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Coming out with .NET for linux and Windows XP what do you invison as the next step for RedHat/Linux in the market place.
Hiya Bob!
The venerable Richard Stallman has a habit of saying that all software should be free -- he is therefor not interested in making Free Software too interoperable with Commercial, Closed-Source software.
On the other had, the also venerable Linus Torvalds has an opposite view; that free software has it's place and that non-free software also has place, and that all efforts should be made to make them co-exist.
Since you have on foot in each world, as it were, what are your feelings on this? Should Free and Open source software be expected to "play nice" with software from various Evil Empires? Or should it concentrate only on relation with other like software projects, and require the commercial world adapt to cooperating with Free software?
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Red Hat has seens its up and its down over the past several years. My questions is pretty simple, if you could change one major thing about Red Hat, what would it be and why?
However, this book is not available online in html format.
Maximum RPM A ten second google search turned that one up. Also try www.rpm.org, where you can get a latex version.
However, *some* of us dont use X windows,
Why not? You're crippling yourself to not run it long enough to print out a hardcopy.
and for us select few, we cant view it.
Try lynx.
I have however, converted it from that format to text, losing much of the styling and formatting.
Yes, that's what happens when you convert something to plaintext.
In the spirit of open source, dont you feel that it is completely BACKWARDS to have a open source tool, where the documentation that allows developers to package using it is proprietary, non-open,
Well, it's not like you can't redistribute it. For free. However it looks like you have to ask permission to modify it. Point granted.
and subject to licensing restrictions?!!?
As most licences are. See "GPL"
The man page doesnt even *mention* half the creation commandline options, and I think that was on purpose.
Perhaps in the interest of brevity? Are you annoyed that they didn't translate maximum rpm into a man page? I'm guessing most people want to know how to use it from a user's, not packager's, perspective. What you want would count as "too much information"
Compunding the issue is the fact that the book has not been updated in years, let alone since the coming of rpm4!
(sigh) Look, this book was pretty good when I used it but I did not take it to be the end-all and be-all rpm bible forever and ever and I doubt redhat intended it to be. There are many various sources of documentation on rpm, I'm sure you can find one that's more up-to-date. Check www.rpm.org.
As a developer, I would love to hear why you dont want me to package using your system. The reasons outlined above lead me to that conclusion.
As a fellow developer, I can't think of a better documented system. On any OS. Which I know is begging for a counterexample, but I would be interested to know about it. Perhaps someone can send me the URL for 'Maximum Dpkg'.
Respectfully, buck
Bob,
We had an Ask Slashdot a few days ago wondering whether a recession will help Linux or not. Since you're the CEO of RedHat, you probably have a better idea as to what effect a recession will have on RedHat and Linux. So, do you think you will gain more market share during a recession than you would otherwise?
I bet with a hat like this you get a bowl of soup. On YOU it looks good!
I don't know whether it's generally true, but I know that the GnuCash project builds seperate RPM's for Mandrake and RedHat, because the library versions on each are quite different.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
With MacOSX arriving as a desktop Unix (more or less) backed by a known, (sometimes) respected name, do you consider Apple to be a serious competitor, the same as Microsoft? Would Red Hat ever consider a PPC release to try and steer people away from MacOSX? Or, instead, do you think Apple will remain largely a niche player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose viability of Unix?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I don't know how it has anything to do with Linux though.
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
Previously, RedHat's line is that "We are not competing with Microsoft". To this outsider, RedHat's goal seems more to be "Ready for the Workstation" (meaning they can sell to developers and engineers used to UNIX, and compete against NT in this space.)
Not to mention that Microsoft lowballs the OEM price of Win9x/ME to the point that it's quite competitive with Linux on price even. The market isn't very profitable unless you look at the aggregate.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
When is RedHat planning to convert the dozens of different formats of documentation that they ship into the Unix standard man page format?
As a user, I don't think pointing at the upstream package maintainers (like GNU) is acceptable, and that any OS distribution should have a common, centralized system of documentation and help.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Linux needs hardware to run on, and that hardware is expensive.
Actually, hardware is usually the cheapest part of the corporate computing puzzle, although, you are correct that capital purchases tend to get cut back during a recession.
The cost of support and software licences and perhaps even infrastructure (network, Internet, etc) far outweigh the cost of hardware.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
How will the current slump in tech help or hurt those of us who make a living administrating and programming on Linux? How will this affect the number of people who become RedHat Linux Certified?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Bob, since you are England this week, what can you do to guarantee the sovereignty of Sealand?
Do you think the plethora of distributions hurts Linux as a whole? And do you view alternate distributions as competitors?
I'm curious about some of the high-level Slashdot interviews. Do they even answer their own questions, or do their PR flaks do it for them and they just review "their" answers? Or is it the other way around, they just dictate answers to the questions directly and then the PR people submit the "answers" based upon their filtering of the original replies.
It strikes me that a senior executive travelling in a foreign country wouldn't really spend the time to fsck around with an Ask-Slashdot interview.
It often seems to me that RedHat is a bit schizophrenic about what it's market is: it can't make up it's mind whether it's for newbies, or a bleeding-edge, experimental distro. Despite the fact that RedHat's reputation was originally built on being eaisier-to-use, it has a distressing habit of shipping alpha quality software and making it the default, in effect pushing it on the new folks who are least able to deal with it. (I'm thinking about AnotherLevel, linuxconf and Enlightenment at the moment, I could probably think of others.) So my question is, can you say something concrete about what RedHat is doing about the problem of Quality? Post-IPO, was there an attempt at beefing up the QA department? Has there been any change in QA proceedures? Are there any plans to deviate from shipping by the calender rather than just whenever the software is ready?
I do realize that this is a difficult problem: how do you work out QA proceedures for software that has no spec? I would guess that you must write your own specs based on how you expect the distribution to be used. Or do you get by without somehow?
Let me say that I purchase and have enjoyed using Red Hat products - although I have stopped at 6.2 for the moment.
/etc/rcx.d. The only real problem was the default inclusion of the rc.local script (which rewrites issue.net at bootup, and still prevents the adoption of Red Hat in some corporate circles - it is believed that this represents an insufficiently serious attitude about system security).
/etc/rc.d/init.d into a completely distinct /etc/sysconfig hierarchy, forming the sort of baroque, convoluted and counterintuitive structure that traditional unices like HPsUX have made famous.
/opt and /contrib? If so, what will differentiate your version of linux from "conceit" operating systems like NetBSD and OpenBSD? If not, will linuxconf be discarded since that is clearly the direction it is taking?
Red Hat Linux at one time had a refreshingly clean approach to system startup; based on System V, but with all the links neatly arranged in
Recent versions of Red Hat move vital configuration information out of
Do you see Red Hat continuing this trend, perhaps even including unneccessary and redundant hierarchies such as
--Charlie
Still plugging that KISS principle....
"We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated inquiries to Bob (who is England this week)"
Is this another case of "le etat c'est moi" attitude, or just your run-of-the-mill typo?
In any case, I'd like to be considered as a royal advisor...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
Then I'd like to ask him, now that he *is* England, what it feels like being afflicted by foot-and-mouth, him coming from the Silicon Valley which is well known for its foot-in-mouth epidemic.
Linux afficionados are also known for their highly contagious tongue-in-cheek comments style, I'm starting to wonder if there wouldn't be a corelation between the time spent on computers and the risk of catching a dreadful three-words diseases. Shall we start digging trenches around tech centers?
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
In Area 51 there are a group of pilots known as "Red Hat" squadron. These pilots are trained to fly in Russian aircraft using Russian tactics to simulate a communist enemy for our pilots. I've always wondered if RedHat's name is a metaphor for a capitalist business masquerading as a communist endevour?
-Scott scott@surrealistic.org
I believe you tried to say: "Who is IN England this week" ...
Hugo
There's money in selling support and other value added services. And the Redhat brand is strong.
But no free software outfit will ever make as much as an aggressive closed source monopoly. It's just a question of expectations really.
Sig pending!
It has something to do with a family member's lacrosse cap (Grandfather?). The hat is colored from Cornell University's school colors.
I'd like some insight on how the decision is made to include something in Red Hat Linux, how quickly to roll in new releases of software, etc.
For example, I've seen pre-releases of KDE get included and updated in rawhide (and I believe in actual Red Hat releases) rather often, but even the individual GNOME components are almost never updated until well after a full stable release is announced. There are other examples, but that's the main one that comes to mind.
There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software in Red Hat to this day. So, I'm just curious how you make these technical decisions are made.
I was just wondering why Redhat made the decision to switch the RedhatNetwork to a subscription-only service. I understand the need for incoming cashflow, but how do you expect people to pay membership fees for RHN when they can switch to Debian's apt or just use Ximian's RedCarpet utility to do the same thing for free?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
So, use Debian.
It has supported Sun4u machines since Debian release 2.1
Average user does not need bind and if you choose workstation install option bind will not be installed.
However, rpc.statd IS install and started by default even in workstation installs. I'd say this is very questionale. I have seen many newbies being hit by kiddies because of this.
RedHat has the biggest name recognition of all the Linux distributions. To many non-tech types Linux == RedHat. And you are now breaking even, yet despite that RedHat's stock went from $80 a share to less than $5 and there doesn't seem to be a sign of that turning around.
What do you say to people who ask why they should invest in RedHat? Also, as a high-tech company I'm sure employees got stock options, how are they dealing with the crash in share prices and how do you convince them their options are still worth something?
... doesn't he have a 'net connection? Heck, a Yahoo mail account and an internet cafe would suffice!
Part of the Second American Revolution!
Recently we've seen several worms attacking vulnerabilities in the default install of Red Hat Linux. What is being done to make the default installation more newbie-friendly from a security point of view? The average desktop user probably doesn't want or need BIND, do they?
--
--
E_NOSIG
One word.
KDevelop
What free IDE does Gnome have?
(and yes, I know that you can make generic Gnome applications within KDevelop, and that you can probably run KDevelop on Gnome, if you have the KDE libraries loaded, but thats the point of Linux, that everything should be able to play together).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Has Red Hat ever considered switching to the deb package format?
because Apple is known for being really bad in creating software.
And nevertheless, they managed to create a UNIX based system that any beginner can use. Many considered this to be impossible.
In the light of this, now compare Apple OS X to you favorite Red Hat or SuSE or whatever Linux distribution (which usually includes KDE and Gnome).
See the point?
Red Hat, SuSE and the like completely failed to make Linux attractive to the masses. They didnt even try.
Linux has no future on the desktop.
This is a simple fact.
Open Source is governed by stupidity and egomania. For this reason, the open source people cannot compete with Apple or Microsoft. They may be more bright, but they are too stupid to overcome their misguided ego.
While good for the company it should be noted that we aren't paying somebody for support on that system. So while I see a recession as being good for linux, I don't see it being good for a linux company. But that's just my experience.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Personally, I think he's a pretty cool guy ;-)
Most of the commercial software companies maintain departments in which basic research into things such as GUI implementations (ala Apple's Human Interface Group) and usability (ala Microsoft's various usability groups) and other areas (ala IBM sponsorship of University projects). It is the work of these groups that has defined much of how GUIs and applications work today.
What sort of research is Red Hat involved in? That is, what kinds of projects are Red Hat's R&D folks involved in? Along those lines, do you see (or hope to see in the future) Red Hat as having a leading role in one of these areas?
Thanks!
but i think it would be in bob youngs/redhats best interest for him to take the time out and give lip service to the /. crowd. we are a concentration of what i would consider to be redhats target audience. on the other hand it might appear as thought he is preaching to the choir in some sense also.
on the other hand when political candidates(like ralph nader who was mentioned by a previous poster) and people who are not targeting their rhetoric at us might feel that we are a waste of time.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
if linux gains ground over windows 2k, i dont think that is _hurting_ linux. look at it as a net gain.
made up numbers:
next year, no recession
2,500,000 windows 2k servers are deployed
1,900,000 linux servers are deployed
next year, with recession
1,000,000 windows 2k servers are deployed
1,500,000 linux servers are deployed
so with no recession windows has a net 600k servers deployed over linux as opposed to 500k linux servers over windows with a recession. granted, with a recession, not as much linux is out there but more there is more linux than windows. speculation is really kinda silly at this point. i can see both sides. now all we have left to do is sit back and wait.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
say for example your company is strapped for cash. you want a new server and some workstations. well if you use linux instead of windows you can get more workstations with the money you saved by not purchasing windows 2000 server and workstation. companies might have to put more thought into purchases. Saving $80 per workstation and $300 per server might make linux more attractive.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Win95 runs on a 486/33 (I've seen it - not fun), so I'm pretty sure 98 does, too. NT4.0 will run on a 486 - I've seen plenty of those... Where it is compiled, and what architecture you choose to compile it for are two different things. They may well all run on a 386, but who want's to test that.
As another poster mentioned, Mandrake comes compiled out of the box (iso) for the newer versions of the x86 architecture.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I've been fairly pleased with Redhat initiatives like The Center for the Public Domain which funds ibiblio (was Metalab, was Sunsite) and other groups working for freedom of information. We know that free software is political and having a representative in various political processes can be helpful. So, what standards bodies is Redhat on, what kind of political lobbying does it do and what issues does it advocate in those fora?
The quality of the questions scored 5 on this interview is extremely poor. Interviewing Bob Young has the chance to be extremely valuable for the slashdot community, however it appears it will be a wasted opportunity. Will he even bother to respond to these questions, as FCC chief technologist David Farber decided not to?
There are serious problems with slashdot's moderation system and there is no forum to deal with these metaissues. Slashdot is very unlike the user driven site it once was.
Not really.
Let's say that a company chooses to use postgres, mysql, interbase, or sapdb instead of SQL server. They can save hundreds of thousands of dollars and still use access through ODBC. No retraining of the desktop users and save a ton of money.
Same goes for things like proxy server, file and print services, ditching exchange, etc. You can fully populate the back end with linux and gain huge savings. You are forced to buy MS licences with every PC anyway so you really can't save money by replacing windows on the client.
Star Office (open office) is actually pretty similar to ms-office especially considering that 90% of users only use 5% of the capability or office. They should pick it up with no retraining at all. If you have custom apps you can port them to kylix or wxwindows to prep for a future migration of your desktop.
War is necrophilia.
Bob, a few years ago, you used to favor the term "free software" to "open source", and talk extensively about the importance of freedom.
These days, you talk less and less about the importance for a company to respect the freedom of users and programmers. Why is that no longer Red Hat's focus?
In other words, do you still hope to take Red Hat forward as a voice of freedom in the business marketplace, or are you focused on something else?
Point of Fact:
Bob Young, while a great guy, is not CEO of Red Hat. That's Matthew Szulik. Bob is the Chairman.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Bob's answered this one on Slashdot before:
l
http://slashdot.org/features/00/10/12/163218.shtm
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I want to hear his opinion. I believe he'll say debian or slackware because they're the safest choices (they don't compete with RH for the business-workstation market and will make him seem hardcore).
Considering how your stock is doing these days, do you think your book's subtitle "How Red Hat Changed the Software Business - and Took Microsoft by Surprise" was a little premature? And to what extent do you blame Nasdaq's fall on ESR's "huckstering". Thanks, Nate
Has ESR hit you guys up for a loan yet? If so, can you cover his debts?
Bob,
It seems to me that GNU/Linux is making the same mistakes that BeOS has made in the past. Not enough focus on application. Linux has alot of applications to do tons of stuff geeks are interested in from networking to clustering. But what linux lacks right now -- is "grunt work" applications. Sales Management, Accounting Packages, Contact Management Packages, Office (en route, I know) and other applications of this nature. Since it is likely that these applications will not be started on there own -- Do you think that linux companies should take it onto themselves to start these kinds of projects? How important do you think these applications are to business acceptance of linux?
apt is not analogus with rpm (rather, dpkg is the packaging tool), you can actually use apt w/ rpm (connectiva is doing this)
http://www.redhat.com/support/books/max-rpm/max-rp m-html/index.html
Yesterday on Slashdot we got responses from an interview of MS exec Doug Miller and he touched upon some areas of Linux that caused a lot of debate and discussion in the forum. My question to you is, would you skim through the Doug's reponses and provide us with your counterarguments or comments?
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Amen to that.
I went to Mandrake just cause they compile all their packages with i686.
PS: I know how to recompile but my RAM is so crappy that I get Sig 11 faults all the time. Rebuilding the kernal is a bitch!
Some of the Slashdot discussion speculated that RedHat might be interested in buying Be. Others noted legal difficulties in opening the BeOS source, but the company recently registered some thought provoking domain names, so they may be planning to try it anyway.
A very interesting comment noted that BeOS and Linux complement each other nicely, with BeOS a great desktop system for end users while Linux works best as a server. It's a good point. We may be expecting a lot of an OS to make it do well on everything from high end mainframes & servers to desktop PCs & handheld PDAs & even small embedded controllers. While it's impressive that Linux can do all this, maybe allowing complementary systems to have complementary roles might be a better idea.
As the head of RedHat (chief hat wearer? ;), what do you think of such speculation? Do you think that Linux could stand to gain by using BeOS technology? Would it be worthwhile to purchase Be &/or get involved in opening their software? If Sony's BeIA driven eVilla internet appliance catches on, having a stake in that contract could be very lucrative, but of course that's a gamble at this point.
Or do you feel that, as much as things may seem superficially similar, that there is too much dissonance between the Linux & BeOS worlds to make a merger worthwhile? Do you disagree that having separate systems for desktop & server could be a good idea? If you feel that there should be "one OS to rule them all," could (indeed, should)Linux take a lesson from Be about how to make a really good, easy, slick desktop frontend for the existing excellent but arcane back end that Linux provides?
In short, should these two be wedded and can such a marriage work?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
after your earlier successes ('father knows best', 'marcus welby, md') do you find red hat is a big enough challenge to keep your emotive skills honed?
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Hi Bob and greetings from home (RTP, NC).
My question is about advertising. Linux in general (and RedHat in particular) is in the minds, discussions, and hands of a lot of people right now, especially techies. In fact, you might say that the current popular growth of Linux relies on word-of-mouth among techies and developers.
Many of us feel like it's ready for the enterprise, and have even done some enterprise deployments (see also: IBM). However, it can be a hard sale, because many of the corporate types ("suits" in the present vernacular) just don't have the offline exposure or introduction to Linux. I stress offline here.
I guess what I'm getting at is, how do you feel about conventional marketing/advertising, most notably television or mainstream magazine advertising? I truly believe the Linux enterprise setting would benefit greatly from a television commercial or advert in Forbes or WSJ. Linux has a strong foothold in the techie community, but I'm finding that most managers, CEO's, etc don't have it much on their radar because of a lack of this secondary (primary?) exposure, which seems like a cheap way to generate massive non-techie awareness if done properly. Think of SAS, SAP, Intel, Sun, etc. and the impact of their television commercials (the Sun starship commercials are particularly entertaining, and have been mentioned to me several times in business discussions). Novell too, except that their commercials are a little goofy.
Your thoughts?
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I work in a centralized support organization at a university.
Some of our clients are happy to upgrade whenever. Ok, that's stretching the truth, but it isn't that hard to convince some folks.
I'm not writing about them. I'm writing about the people who hate upgrading.
Some of our clients just refuse to upgrade. "We must have a stable system".
This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the facts that:
1) Redhat releases often - about every 6 months it seems.
2) Redhat stops releasing patches for an OS release fairly early.
This combined means that anything but a x.y release, where y is the last minor revision of the x major revision of a redhat os, doesn't work so well for our clients (because redhat continues to release patches for a decent amount of time for the last y of an x, but not for earlier y's).
So for a while, we decided we were only going to support the last y of an x. However, naturally, clients started saying that was just too old. "Why do we want to install something 2 releases back? What good does that do?" We can explain all we want, clients just don't understand.
So I'm asking, can redhat consider either releasing less often, or continuing to support releases with patches longer? If neither of these work for redhat, do you have any suggestions for us that might help our situation?
I should add that upgrade procedures don't work well with the heavy sysadmin automation we use here. We always reinstall from scratch, and our many scripts (in one unified framework) put back the tweaks.
Many hardware vendors are starting to claim "support" for Linux, but are only creating binary-only, 386-compiled RPM driver packages, resulting in vendor-distribution lock-in for their customers. This is being done almost exclusively with RedHat Linux, and leaves a very bad taste in customer's mouths when they realize they have been burned.
An example culprit is Dell. The "Dell" RAID controller is a modified Adaptec RAID controller which is not supported under the kernel, but can be made to work under (only) RedHat 5.x/6.x while running a specific kernel version (the latest release was only for 2.2.14 kernels). I entirely understand that these driver choices are made entirely by the vendor (Dell) and are their responsibility, but a larger problem remains.
Dell offers "Linux" packaged on some of their hardware, and claim that they are compatible with "Linux" with that hardware. Of course, much of their hardware is only "compatible" with RedHat Linux, and only under specific RPM releases for specific default RedHat kernels (such as the RAID situation just mentioned). This hardware vendor trend has caused a sort of "embrace and extend" situation involving hard-compiled drivers packaged via RPM. I have to work with three "Linux-compatible" servers at work that are NOT Linux kernel compatible. I am forced to run RedHat 6.1 with the 2.2.14 kernel, because it is NOT possible to upgrade to a newer kernel, or a newer distribution. It certainly leaves the impression that RedHat is trying to push other Distributions out of the market, while locking-in their customers to quickly outdated (and vulnerability-ridden) software.
How does RedHat stand on the endorsement/promotion/disapproval of such actions by OEM partners, such as Dell?
How do you feel about the indirect damages upon the rest of the Linux community, due to RedHat's stance on this issue?
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
As a packager of some products, I have encountered the difficulty that is present packaging for RPM.
First, a small rant. The primary "ideal" source of information for how to package rpm's is of course the book "Maximum RPM".
However, this book is not available online in html format. It is however available in postscript which is easily read in X windows on a redhat machine.
However, *some* of us dont use X windows, and for us select few, we cant view it. I have however, converted it from that format to text, losing much of the styling and formatting.
In the spirit of open source, dont you feel that it is completely BACKWARDS to have a open source tool, where the documentation that allows developers to package using it is proprietary, non-open, and subject to licensing restrictions?!!?
The man page doesnt even *mention* half the creation commandline options, and I think that was on purpose.
Compunding the issue is the fact that the book has not been updated in years, let alone since the coming of rpm4!
As a developer, I would love to hear why you dont want me to package using your system. The reasons outlined above lead me to that conclusion.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
If openpackages becomes a defacto standard for *BSD, would your company consider switching from RPM to it, in order to allow the holy grail of "one package for all free/open (definition may vary) systems" ?
This of course presuming that upon reaching that status, it has features that are comparable or better than rpm. (Which the current FreeBSD ports/pkg system CERTAINLY has acheived -- wouldnt you agree?)
Further, have you considered switching to the apt-get/deb system? It is the number one reason most people seem to switch to debian, and in every way I know of seems to be superior technically to rpm.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
With your sponsorship of ibiblio.org, and some comments that you have made, you have shown that you care about providing easy access to public-domain (and open-licensed) works - from software to art to research materials. I applaud this effort, and would be interested in hearing what you think needs to be done on a larger scale to make these resources more readily available to the general public. Would a superior metadata system help, allowing for better searching and cataloging? Does the web provide a good enough user experience for this, or do we need better peer-to-peer filesharing systems, with sites like ibiblio.org as permenant nodes? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Unfortunately, most hardware vendors support Microsoft because MS has the largest share of the market and they know it will pay to support MS with drivers.
Linux is not in that state, save for (perhaps) networking devices. Has RedHat considered helping to fund driver development for other forms of hardware? I'm thinking mostly of 3D accelerated video cards (by helping to fund the DRI group), but other items (scanners, USB->IDE interfaces, etc.) would be nice too.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Rob, what's up with the x.0 releases?
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
In the recent interview with Doug Miller, he spoke of, or implied, that the lack of a standardized desktop could be keeping commercial developers from creating Linux applications. Do you think it's possible, or desirable, to come up with an 'official' desktop for Linux? If so, what do you feel is the best way to go about it?
I'm not so sure about this. As we heard the guy from Microsoft say a few days ago, the price of software is not everything. Linux needs hardware to run on, and that hardware is expensive. So, if companies don't have money to buy hardware due to the recession, that won't be a good thing for Linux.
Ok fine maybe the recession will help linux gain ground over Windows 2000. But probably Linux would be deployed more widely if there was no recession in the first place. So I don't see the recession really helping Linux all that much.
It seems that a tried and true method of increasing a computer product's market- and/or mind-share is to get it into the hands of high school or university students, assuming that when they (eventually) hit the business world they will use the product. Does RedHat target those areas, and if so in what ways (e.g. do you donate computers w/RedHat Linux to high schools, partner with universities on development, etc.)?
Are you a dog person or a cat person? Why?
-Chris
What's your opinion on the LSB's plans to include Debian's APT instead of RedHat's RPM, which is actually a standard package format used by many other Linux distribution?
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
RedHat is one of those few (if not to say the only), who has certification program. On one hand, I don't see much of the advertising of RedHat certification on the net, while on the other hand, it is possible to receive RHCE even here in Cyprus (from NetU).
What are RedHat plans/strategies on promoting RedHat Linux Certification?
Is there any interest in this certification program from resellers,corporations,IT proffessionals and/or anyone else?
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Can you put Afterstep back into the distro? I have no problem downloading it, but when you try to convince other people to try it, they want to have the RPM on the CD. Besides, I think Afterstep is wonderful. Or do you envision the desktop going to only KDE and Gnome?
Hi Bob,
About three years ago (or so) Redhat stopped selling any proprietary software after having previously acted as a channel for a variety of vendors including Metro-X, X/Open Motif, and (IIRC) Applixware. In doing so you made your company center its attention fully on open source, but at the same time you closed one of the then best available sales channels for companies interested in selling commercial software for Linux.
Retrospectively, do you think this was a net benefit to the open source community, and how do you think that Redhat and the community's view of Redhat would have been altered if it had continued to funnel commercial software into the market?
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Does the shareholders lawsuit just filed going to distract your firm from maintaining the 75+% mindshare with linux developers? It seems for web servers, RedHat is a favorite, and by a wide margin.
Given the nature of the embedded side of your business, does Wind River's announced purchase of BSD code going to cause your firm to work harder, or just give up on the embedded side? Wind River didn't have a compelling price point per unit that can match the Open Source/Free Software models. And, well, no BSD or Linux vendors can pay 1 billion and get BSD/gnu-linux embedded in a set-top box.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
What kind of improvements do you think are the most important in order for linux to succeed further? Which of these areas is RedHat going to be active in?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Lots of Linux distributions (Mandrake-Linux is an example) have started from a version of RedHat and then added their own features and applications. This is, of course, the benefit of open source software. I'd like do know whether RedHat too has benefited from that by putting some of these enhencements back into RedHat distributions. If so, can you give the most important examples?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
ot that money means anything but how did it feel these last few years as RHAT went from about 150 to 5 over the last 18 months or so?
Was it depressing? Did you feel tha the 150 was so outlandish that it couldn't sustain itself?
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Damn I'm old. Then it turns out it wasn't even My Three Sons, it was Father Knows Best, so I'm old and senile.
Dear Mr. Young,
I remember not too many years ago when basically everyone in the Linux community liked Red Hat. Even non-Red Hat users who didn't prefer the Red Hat operating system liked the company and the people.
I myself was, for a long time, a staunch supporter of your Red Hat Linux product, but a stronger supporter of Red Hat as a company.
In 1998, Eric Troan said at a public event that IPOing would not seem logical, as Red Hat would have to "answer to investment bankers" and ever since the IPO, the feelings about Red Hat in many people's minds has declined.
Although the number of Red Hat users has increased, the amount of negative things said about Red Hat corporation have also increased (at perhaps a faster rate).
Rather than a symptom of size and success, don't you feel that Red Hat has made some moves which have rubbed the Linux community the wrong way (for instance the recent move to charge for using the automatic update program, the use of an unblessed gcc, the fact that Red Hat promises to release all source that it owns yet owns companies whose source is proprietary)?
What do you think about this?
What steps is Red Hat taking to change its perception in the mind of the Linux community?
- Serge Wroclawski
>You blew it when you claimed that Compaq reverse engineered the IBM Bios
See part II of "Triumph ofthe Nerds" for an accurate history... search the transcript for "Compaq".
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
He'll say:
On the advice of counsel, I cannot comment on pending litigation.
At least you were able to vent.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
The model around Linux is truly bizarre. How much do RedHat or Calderareally make from selling their distributions? It seems not very much. Soin order for them to survive they rely on selling proprietary software,support, services, books, tee shirts, penguins etc. Not a veryrevolutionary business, but in the end they must sell something if theywant to survive.
In general, Microsoft is touting the position that Linux companies will not survive much longer.
Any rebuttal?
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
It was Mark Ewing's (co-founder of RedHat) lacrosse cap
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
I was dismayed to see you and Mark step aside and let the new-hires (or new-acquires?) take control of the company.
What have been the good and bad effects of the new management?
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
There's an old Irish saying:
If you want to know what god thinks of money, look at those he gives it to.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
This is the same question I asked Doug Miller of Microsoft:
When Compaq (later followed by others) loosened the GoldenRing from IBM's grasp by reverse engineering theirproprietary bios, theOpen Hardware PC platform revolution was ignited.Motherboards, memory, adapter cards, etc... could be made byanybody; hardwareinnovation increased at a rapid pace, and prices plummeted.
That left only two proprietary pieces atop the Open HardwarePC: the Intel CPU and the Microsoft OS.
Intel's been losing ground, especially with clone maker AMD(but, AMD still has to pay Intel royalties for every cloneprocessor).
The OS, though, has proven tough to emulate. Not only doesit reach the pinnacle of complexity (where chaos kicks in),but any emulatormust chase Microsoft's tail: the emulation will be worthlesscome Microsoft's next OS patch (i.e. the DRDOS settlement).
In Judge Jackson's findings in the Microsoft Antitrust case, he concluded that Linux is not positioned to overtake Windows, because it isn't Windows compatible.People won't switch because of the training costs and potential for incompatibility with their existing data.
Personally, I believe Open Source is a software revolution, just on a different tangent from the average user. In order to win over the average user: they don't just need a great desktop, they need full Windows compatibility.
How will Open Source lure the average user from Windows?
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
How do you feel about the fact that Red Hat Linux was 'the womb' of what would now have to be considerer one of the strongest Linux distros for the desktop, and a major competitior to Red Hat on the desktop with it's claimed "99% Red Hat compatibility"?
Do you think this whole US/China thing could have been avoided had the parties involved used Redhat on their aircraft?
-- "You used your dictaphone to post, didn't you?"
Am I the only one who saw the headline and thought it was about the guy who played Marcus Welby?
I've never understood how the license for cygwin works. On your website it mentions GPL, but I was told it is only GPL to certain people how exactly does that work?
(Note this isn't a question about having to GPL code that would link against cygwin, but rather that companies cannot distribute cygwin at all without paying license fees)
Rebuilding the kernel isn't something I have to do anymore, but many businesses (hint, hint) still need to load exotic drivers and such for development, and there's still much to be developed.
Redhat's always been bad about 'hotrodding' the environment in which the kernel lives, specifically in the area of kernel headers for SMP machines.
I spent most of a year getting my 3D environment nailed down and the framerates where they need to be. What I kept hearing was "Redhat does funny things with the kernel headers" and for that reason my machine sat idle.
For how much longer will I unable to tell people 'just drop in a kernel from kernel.org'?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Developers of open source software that allow the world to download and use thier software don't usually have "Will this get me $$$" on their mind. They just want to create a program that people will find useful and maybe even enjoyable.
RedHat and other Distros sell prebuilt Systems where they basically compile all of the packages, make sure that on a default install everything works without the user having to recompile and develop a method for installing the whole thing.
Developers of open source software would be over joyed that their software is considered important enough that it takes up a small(or in some cases large) amount of an install CD and is going to be distributed in such a way as that an end user, possibly new to Linux can just click on an icon or type a filename and bang, they are up and running, no downloading or compiling required.
RedHat isn't selling the Software per se.. they are selling a service, making it so joe blow can get everything he needs from a CD or 6 instead of having to spend hours downloading and compiling.. finding out he needs a different library version, downloading, installing... repeat.
So no, the developers don't deserve to be paid. If they wanted to be paid they wouldn't have given it away and allowed others to repackage and redistribute it to begin with... and if they really have a problem with thier software being in the distro they can always tell the company to take it out of the next version.
...Bob (who is England this week), and he'll send back his answers...
So is Bob all of England, or just just Whales?
For much of the non-Slashdot computer community, RedHat has become synonymous with Linux. That puts a huge burden of responsibility on RH's shoudlers as the standard bearer for Linux. What is RH doing to make sure that they are doing what's best for Linux, both as a piece of software and a community? How do we know that RH won't AOLify Linux? Or is that one of its goals?
--
Not worth asking, as companies can almost never comment on pending court cases, for fear of saying something that can be used against them.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If Bob is England, can I be Japan?
Oh yes, go on, correct your typos without telling anybody so that my oh-so-witty post now reads like a submission from a brainfarted thicko.
If capitalism works, why are there so many stupid rich people?
Could you explain this better please? I don't want to start a economics flame war, so I would appreciate politeness. I think capitalism works better then any other model for human management currently being deployed. I don't know any stupid rich people, in fact I believe what mostly separates the rich from the poor in capitalism is education. The beauty of capitalism is that it moves resources (money) to the innovative. Just looking for a friendly debate.
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Bob, I work for a large corporation looking to run virtual instances of Linux on an s390. Currently there is no s390 offering from RedHat. With the support IBM is throwing behind Linux (porting applications and money), what is the strategy for deploying RedHat on the s390 if any? I only ask this because we may move massive amounts of infrastructure (NT File sharing etc.) to the Big Iron on Linux... In fact I believe it is in this manner that may allow Linux one of the biggest breaks into big corporations.
----------
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
----------
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Thanks for the polite response! I can't say that a share your experiances, or your opinions, but civilized people can disagree civiliy (hard to find on slashdot).
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Very simple question: When is RedHat 7.1 going to be released?
Vote Libertarian
Is this a case of sour grapes after the metoric rise and subsequent fall of RHAT?
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
I still don't know.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
The problem with capitalism is that it gives an obscene amount of resource to a very small minority of people and those people aren't particulary clever or innovative, they're just incredibly lucky and/or greedy. To see what rich people do with their money is what convinced me of that. Anyway all that argument is not really important to me since I really don't want stupid people to be poor either, I mean we are always someone else's dork, I believe in fair sharing of resources and equal opportunity of hapiness for all, and as it stands right now, capitalism just doesn't cut it.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Does the Mandrake Sparc release work with the hardware you want or is it more along the lines of the NetBSD port?
They don't seem to have any news about it either. They have 7.1 but it is beta and Corporate Server. Corporate Server is based on 7.1 but doesn't say anything about being beta.
So, do you see this trend reversing? Do you think that in five years Linux will have made a huge gain in end-user mindshare? I'm not talking going from 0.1% of the users worldwide to 0.2%. I'm talking about seeing Linux being used by 10% or more of all desktops out there.
I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on a CD-R somewhere
Bob-- Given the way the tech market in general and the Linux market in particular have gone over the past year, Red Hat, as the brand leader, is clearly in the catbird seat. In order to give Linux the credibility and reach it deserves, there need to be more end-user applications, and application software vendors want standards. Microsoft is a standard by its sheer dominance; Java is a standard by Sun's grace, but Linux has the opportunity to be a much more open standard. What do you think of the current direction of the Linux Standards Base and where do you see Red Hat fitting in?
DaBuddha
You get a free OS. Or did you write your entire distro yourself?
Let's face it, you either do something yourself or you pay someone to do it for you. If you want a free OS (Linux), put in the time like everyone else towards the common goal. If you want someone else to write it for you (Windows), pay up and don't complain about how they make it.
There's nothing wrong with either way. Just deal with the constraints each method offers.
What is your strategy for embedded systems? Embedded distros from the likes of MontaVista and LynuxWorks are quikly taking larger chunks of the embedded market. WindRiver has a strong foothold with its proprietary VxWorks RTOS and now has bought BSDi. How do you counter that? Also, any plans for supporting more embedded hardware (XScale for example)?
Why is it that sendmail is part of the base install (can't [de]select it in the package list)? Apache isn't. Bind isn't. wu-ftpd isn't. Why is sendmail, especially given its history of security problems? (or have you fixed this in RH7.1?)
Yes, I know you can always uninstall it when you first log in, but it seems a bit worrying considering that newbies probably wouldn't.
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
I know that their is only one distro (debian) that harps on RMS's "it's GNU/Linux dammit" rant. I agree with his stance, although I usually don't call it GNU/Linux just because it's hard enough to explain to people what Linux is if they have never heard of it, and adding the GNU adds about another 15-30 minutes of explaining. What made you choose for Red Hat to use just "Linux"?
Do you really think that all the different developers could agree on one distro? Between window managers, text editors, mail clients, even down to location of installed programs (/usr/local/www vs. /home/httpd/), but then again that's the beauty of open source. If you like something setup in a certain way, then by all means, do it! When most people starting using Linux, they go for the easiest to use distro (usually). After that, I really recomend trying others if you want, and even checking out different types of Unix out there (BSD, Solaris, etc) for variety.
Which brand of ketchup do you buy?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Bob Young is no longer CEO. Red Hat is not the top (limiting "top" to "most widely used"), unless you mean in the US.
------
Not a typewriter
What would you say are the top 5 most important, most valuable, most useful, etc. pieces of software currently available on Linux?
What is your view on the Microsoft .NET and its impact on Linux in general and RedHat in particular?
Perhaps you should check the ftp trees.
/ os /i686/glibc-2.2-12.i686.rpm
/ os /i686/kernel-enterprise-2.2.17-14.i686.rpm
For example:
ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/7/redhat/updates/7.0/en
ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/7/redhat/updates/7.0/en
Same goes for i586.
No sig is worth reading.
Having received email from "Jennifer Mahlmann" Manager, Learning Services; I can say they there are people within RedHat that run MS-Windows:
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
Doug Alcorn
For example, we Linux users have a choice of either KDE or Gnome for a desktop. We have a choice of prompts, choice of window managers, choice of MANY different things. For the tech-head, this is great. Freedom in development is great. Though, for the average, ever-elusive novice Linux user, this freedom to choose is complicated and can be very confusing.
How is Red Hat planning on this interoperability/easy user experience without pigeon-holeing(sp?) themselves into one market or another, or splintering into sub-distributions?
thelocust[dot]org
Slackware SPARC
Redhat is in the same boat as VA Linux as far as lawsuits. I'm going out on a limb and guessing that you believe that nothing has gone wrong. Why do you believe that these company's are attacking you and VA? What do you honestly believe the outcome for both will be?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What are, if any, Redhat's plans for the enterprise desktop? Has there been any consideration towards working with Ximian?
-= jester =-
Hi Bob,
Over the past couple of years the "soup du jour" of the "Open Source Business Model" has been the notion of software as a service. While, I firmly believe that this is the way software should be marketed, I've yet to be convinced that anyone has found the "way". With Ximian, Eazel, and a host of other companies offering the promise of value added services for their software, what in your opinion sets Red Hat apart from the rest?
Thank you.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
That's a misconception, that RedHat in other distros are just taken the code out there and slapping it on a CD. They are introducing new tools (like RPM and various installers) which requires their people to get paid -- no other way around it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
What is your reaction to this comment, and do you think the current Open Source business model works? Does it need to be changed?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
With the passing of each day, it becomes more and more obvious that the strengths of Linux are best shown in the embedded space. Tux might be having trouble getting into the desktop market, but he has no trouble running your coffee machine... :)
Some experts think that we are quickly moving toward the day when the desktop computer will be history. I know very successful people who don't use a desktop computer, but couldn't live without a PDA.
What do you think about the future of the desktop vs the handheld in general, and how does Linux fit into that?
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
I now understand from most people whom I have related my horror stories to, that the prevailing attitude is, "Don't upgrade from 6.x to 7.0; wipe and do a fresh install."
That would have been unacceptable given my investment in setting up the machine over the past few years. Did RH recognize this problem with the upgrade path? If so, why wasn't a warning given?
Bingo Foo
---
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Linux desktops have been struggling to gain acceptance: even basic graphics support is hard to install on many laptops. In addition, good applications to match those on the Windows platform are scarce. Now Apple is poised to become the number one shipper of Unix desktops in the world and their GUI is awesome in appearance and power with real applications starting to come out (Macromedia Freehand next month). Mac OS X could easily become the dominant professional and consumer Unix desktop. What is Red Hat's plan for the desktop? What are your plans to convince us to buy a Windows laptop and install Red Hat instead a Mac G4 Titanium laptop for about the same price?
Hello, first, as a possible customer (I have purchased 3 Caldera and 3 SuSE distros in the past) let me tell you what product that I would like, then please make an estimate on what the yearly charge would be.
I would like a single user/ single PC subscription that would default to relatively high security settings with a firewall, and automatic RPM package installation from your web site of selected packages. Further, I would like limitted off site secure backup of selected data on my PC (a client would encrypt it, perhaps using already installed PGP, so your company would not have access to my data). In order to cut down bandwidth requirements, I would want installed packages stored locally for fast re-installs, etc. One of the most valuable tools that I own for managing Linux installations is DriveImage because it lets me compress and backup Linux partitions so that if anything gets messed up when upgrading, I can do a quick restore. Some such utility should be bundled with your service.
What might be a reasonable charge for such a service?
Your new services seem geared towards businesses rather than individual users.
Thanks,
--Mark Watson
--Java consulting: www.markwatson.com
Bob,
Debian has, for a long time now, had the ability to automaticaly upgrade entire distributions with a few simple commands.
Many members of the community seem to think that RedHat's refusal to impliment this type of ability is a sign of building a "crippled" distribution. I can see where this would help you sell revisions to the distribution.
I am wondering what your view are on purposly crippling the software to require purchased upgrades?
(note, the RedHat Network does not count. Please don't insinuate the abilities are the same. This is not a managed services question.)
Where did you get that hat,
Where did you get that hat?
Oh arse
Why a red hat?
How do you feel about all the security issues that have been coming up about "Linux" which have been only Red Hat issues?
The Beaver The Best Things In Life Are Free And So Is Linux!
Main Entry: haberdasher
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Pronunciation: 'ha-b&(r)-"da-sh&r
2 : a dealer in men's clothing and accessories
sulli
RTFJ.
Who's your haberdasher, and where should we go for stylish fedoras (red or otherwise)?
sulli
RTFJ.
Reprice and/or hand out more options. Common practice when stocks go down.
sulli
RTFJ.
How do you see free-software companies like RedHat staying viable in an increasingly dot-com-hostile economy, when their main product can be obtained for free?
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
What is the maximum financial and criminal exposure to Red Hat, yourself and other Red Hat executives stemming from the alleged improprieties and resultant lawsuits related to the company's IPO?
How do you respond to the thought that you really never cared about open source software and you only got involved with Red Hat and Linux to "jump on the bandwagon" and try to make your mark on society.
Doug Miller, a Microsoft executive, was recently interviewed for Slashdot. Many of the questions posed were regarding the competitiveness of Linux with Windows in the medium-term. To paraphrase, Rob said that there was no viable business model based on Linux, that the lack of standardization (ie. KDE v. Gnome) would be enough of an economic disincentive to commercial application developers to prevent them from venturing into the market.
On the face of it, he seems to have a point. What do you think? Does Linux need to be herded down the path towards a super-majority recognized 'standard' to be successful, or can the type of open-source movement to date provide enough tools and applications to drive Linux to dominance?
Milo
Why not you and the guys from other distros cooperate to make one big fat juicy (in terms of code quality and consistency) linux package? I'm not talking about a "ein folk, ein reich, ein furher" kind of idea, don't get me wrong. It is nice to have a choice, but it would be also very interesting to see what a nice cooperation would lead to. You have ideas, they have ideas, why not collect them all in one package? Isn't this what Open Source is about anyway?
thanks, bye.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
As seen here
RedHat recently announced its engagement to develop a strong e-commerce platform. The press release said RH will integrate Akopia's popular Interchange e-commerce platform into Red Hat's solutions portfolio that includes Interchange, the Stronghold Secure Web Server and CCVS e-commerce payment system for a comprehensive e-commerce solution stack.
Considering the dot com failures for exclusively online retail outlets and the high costs of implementing and maintaining an e-commerce site for existing small brick and mortar business owners, do you consider packaging together a securely pre-configured e-commerce server, geared toward the non-technical end user, a potential profit making "product" ?
Or do you envision the ongoing e-commerce platform development resulting in a complex, flexible platform, which will generate income to RedHat by providing mainly e-commerce stite building consulting services to large companies? Or do you envision both and if so, which track do you think will more likely generate income for RedHat ?
Do you feel that the slow down in the dot com economy will be of advantage for your open source e-commerce product in competing against similar commercial platforms ? Or do you consider it as being a loosing battle ?
Basically, do you see a future for secure, e-commerce server for the masses of end-users, who can't afford high consultancy fees, but would need a low-cost solution in form of a shrink wrapped package with some basic technical support from RedHat like automatic upgrades and security fixes ?
I'm just wondering if RedHat has any plans for supporting a standard game engine abstraction layer for GNU/Linux. The success of games under Windows seems to hinge on DirectX, and I'm wondering if we might see something like the Simple DirectMedia Layer distributed with future RedHat distributions?
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Red hat once boasted that its aim was not to become as big as Microsoft, but to make Microsoft as big as Red Hat.
I am still longing to see it happen. Can you offer me a progress report?
I am anarch of all I survey.
RedHat seems to have quite a reputation among software developers for "doing things on a whim". By this I mean things such as the gcc/RH7.0 fiasco. How is RedHat planning on enhancing its QA focus to stop things like that from happening again?
How much usage of non-Red Hat systems (Windows, Mac, commercial Unix, *BSD, other Linux) is there at Red Hat?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Bob, if you had a non-technical friend or relative who currently uses Windows, Quicken, Office, IE and AOL, could you in good conscience tell him it would be in his best interest to use Linux instead? What exactly would be in it for him?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I am your average new Linux user and personally bought Red Hat 6.2 sometime last year. Being new to Linux I did not know many commands. I was dissappointed with the lack of support (in the form of a brochure, commands, etc.) that came with the software I purchased. I'll be honest, it took me two days of searching the web and newsgroups to learn that I needed to type "startx" to get to the xwindows. My skills were further tested when I had to learn commands to decompress files nevermind having to compile them.
My question would be: What are you doing to bring Red Hat to the masses of average computer users?
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
With the recent release of MacOS X, we see at least a willingness in the market to embrace at least part of open source. We also see the opposite, more restriction of media & software, by others in the business (ex: Gates' statement about "renting" software in a recent speech)
my question: how do you see business's embracing open source in the future? i.e., will companies stick to the service/support niche, or perhaps branch out?
~dijjnn
I was wondering what directions you pictured RedHat Software taking, with how best to develop a Linux distribution, be it for home use, commercial use, or server use, or if you had originally had something in mind other than what has developed, and where do you think RedHat, as well as this community, should be heading?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Do you think that laws such as the DMCA pose a threat to open source software, in that they may lead to the creation of proprietary, encrypted file formats, running only on proprietary operating systems, for media such as films, music and books?
It seems like the more Microsoft tries to tighten its grip on its users, the more of an opportunity it would be for Windows alternatives like Linux. Do you forsee Microsoft's "Rent Software Or Be Cut Off" strategy helping the spread of Linux to any great degree?
Paul Barth
He's probably gonna have to settle some issues with Lord British before the UN signs off on it though.
BOSTON SUCKS!
Not to be downing them, but what's up with most of the .0 releases? It seems like there's usually something wrong with them (as with the broken 7.0).
Other than that, RedHat's a pretty damned good distro.
What do you think about people calling Red Hat the "Microsoft of the Linux world?" Do you think this is a valid association?
Will you stick with the GNOME environment to feature "killer apps" like Nautilus and Evolution or will you ever switch to KDE now that anti-aliasing support and similar heavy-hitting apps are available, not to mention the GPL'ing of Qt? Do you feel Red Hat made the right choice to go with GNOME?
What do you think of cnnfn.com's recent "Top Ten Tech Stocks to Avoid" article that mentions Red Hat as one of them?
Will we ever see a SPARC platform release of Red Hat again? Red Hat implied that there just wasn't enough customer demand. As someone who has used it, I have to admit - I kind of miss it, especially now that the 2.4 kernel and many heavy advancements have been made to things like GNOME and XFree86, etc.
As a shareholder of both Red Hat and Microsoft, among others, it has been gratifying to me to see Red Hat doing so well in becoming profitable.
My question is, where do you see the profitable areas of Linux as being for Red Hat (or other distros)? Is it embedded systems more than servers, or info appliances? And has the introduction of major players such as IBM into the Linux R&D space been a help or a hindrance to Linux growth?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I am a former Red Hat user. I use Linux for all my computing applications other than gaming, for which I must still use win98. However most of my time is spent in linux. I always used Red Hat because it's installer was easy and flawless. I really didn't pay much attention to different distros, but because I got Red Hat to work I stuck with it from 6 to 7. The only problem I had with it was its lack of compatability with my Promise Ultra 66 card.
Then about a month ago I was told about Mandrake. I realized hey, Mandrake 8 beta blows red hat 7 out of the water. Heck Mandrak 7.2 blows red hat out of the water. Red hat 7 doesn't even have KDE2! And now you are charging people to use the auto package updater, which is an application many users (some wont admit) can't do without.
I ask you, why should I switch back to using Red Hat 7 rather than Mandrake or another distribution? Will Red Hat soon come with more up to date packages like KDE 2? Will it come with more hardware support? I would really like it to because it's installer is so intuitive, but I really can't go back from where I am now.
To summarize it for you. Why is the red hat distribution always behind the rest of the distributions in terms of hardware support, packages, kernel version upgrades, XFree86 upgrades, etc. ???
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What do you think of derivative distros, not only ones like Mandrake but also more targeted ones like KRUD?
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Is there any truth behind a recent debate which you purportedly clashed with Microsoft's Jim Allchin over the alledged "un-american" nature of Open Source software.
Why did you call it "Red Hat" Linux, and not "Blue Shirt" or "Nehru Jacket" Linux? Does the name "Red Hat" have any significance or was it just thought up in the spur of the moment?
Why did you decide to not name the company Red Hat GNU linux, paying homage to the GNU software running on top of the linux kernel?
Point taken: I probably should have been more explicit about what I meant.
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
We all know that Linux (especially in combination with Apache) rules the server space. However, widespread adoption in other spaces seems elusive; only developers and geeks run it as a desktop OS, microkernel architectures tend to be preferred for embedded applications (where I'm betting the Hurd will do well), and nobody outside of IBM uses Linux to run a wristwatch.
Where do you see future growth for Linux? Do you think ease-of-use issues (e.g., recompiling the kernel to support a newly-installed device) will eventually be conquered, allowing broader desktop adoption, or will Wine be the key, by pushing back application availability horizons? Will my consumer appliances run linux anytime soon? My car's dashboard?
Thanks for your time.
- Brad "Toaster: Kernel panic" Heintz
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I've recently switched over to Debian from RedHat, the main reason being Debian's incredibly easy-to-use APT package tool. RPM and RedHatNetwork provides a similar function but is a pay service. Regardless of which is better, what do you propose should be done to develop some standard for upgrading various distributions?
---
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
Do you promote the use of desktop - redhat in your corporate environment to prove to the visiting investors / PR people that is is ready ? If not, do you think it might help focus the attentions of your desktop development team (if that's what you call them) that it's vital to redhat to break into the desktop market.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
RedHat's x86 Linux distro is compiled on an i386. This means meeting the lowest common denominator for the Intel architecture, just as Windows 95/98/NT is only compiled on a Pentium. Does RedHat plan on making multiple distros for higher Intel architectures? I would think this could make RedHat a more favorable option when choosing a distro, since compiling for higher architectures can mean improved efficiency.
Developers: We can use your help.
Bob,
Are you aware that on page 181 in your book Under the Radar there is a blatant grammer mistake? In heading III, 3 sentences down, the word make should be instead the word made.
Being the open source genius you are, I must admit, I am slightly disappointed.
Do you believe this mistake could have been prevented if the Linux text editor you used (vi) had an artificailly intelligent paper clip that winked at you and danced around?
PS. Don't ask him this. I might want a job at Redhat someday.
Seeing as where you started Red Hat, just one question comes to mind:
Carolina, Duke, or <gasp!> the Wolfpack?
When I originally picked up RedHat Linux 5.0 the first thing I bought was your distribution of OSF Motif. I've always prefered a Linux desktop that was virtually identical to my corporate desktop. With Motif and CDE I was able to do that. What were your resons for dropping these producs, and will we ever see them again perhaps even bundled in an enterprise workstation edition of RedHat Linux?
'Same speed C but faster'
There has been a lot of excitement about IBM formally entering the OSS community recently (understandably), and it seems that they are keeping quite busy at it. What's your take on working with IBM? Are they truly entrenched in the OSS movement? What advantages to us normal geeks (you know, the ones that can't quite afford a big bad blue super-computer yet) do you see coming from this relationship? Obviously, whenever a contender like IBM enters the fray, there's going to be trickle down technology, but is there anything that you see coming down the pipe that just makes you go "Wow!"?
$man microsoft
Crowded elevator smell different to midget. -Chinese Proverb
Redhat is investing money into developing their product and it is making money through CD sales, literature and support, including Redhat network. Did you consider the possibility of other companies offering added value service based on Redhat's distribution, updates, etc.? If some company guaranteed identically the same updates, for example, but for less (or for free), wouldn't a lot of customers go for it?
Thanks
Wroot
To better specify what I mean, I'll restate:
Will Red Hat galvanize development in more base systems to improve Linux performance, paralleling improvements made by other operating systems?
As Linux stands now for the private market user, Linux runs gui, which access an xwindows driver and a shell, and the shell, in turn, refers process through a sequence buffer that accesses the kernel, and in many ways, this is what caused many problems for Windows and other platforms.*
Graphic-accessing applications would run far more efficiently if the graphic management tools, as also suggestable, the gui, were imbedded as part of a shell. Even more efficiently, as the newer generation of Microsoft operating systems do now and will continue to in the future, is implant nearly the whole kitten-kaboodle to run out of the kernel,** though, that would be more of something in charge by Linus, but most Linux distributors make their own slight alterations to the kernel, anyways.
Personally, I have gotten many to either switch over, or atleast try Linux, and their only major complaint is the "lagginess" of the gui, especially for the more high-end games that come as third party attachments with some distros. Of course, as long as the only option to move from frame to frame is xclear, there's not much of surprise there...
In short, it because of others that I ask if Red Hat may have already or may someday consider taking on the re-development of the more base systems. Personally, I just stick with Mah Jongg...though, one must take a liking to Quake...as a graphical engine, I mean...yeah, of course.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
By Slashdot request, I seperated my questions...
With more and more people learning, coding and finding weaknesses in the kernel and other parts of the Linux operating system, will Red Hat consider using the OpenBSD development style, in which vulnerabilities are found and repaired in an almost line-by-line effort?
I'm sure Red Hat has a whole team of people constantly checking, but, unlike with OpenBSD, way too many flaws slip past and seem to require a patch somewhere down the road as a buffer gets over-ridden and SU access is gained, and more often than not, it's usually something that affects Red Hat and similarly architectured distros.
It's not merely an opinion, it is becoming quite obvious that architecture and code is not checked well enough to protect larger commercial servers. I mean no offense to those that work at Red Hat, development is done quite well, but some hacker seems to find a flaw with each release relatively quickly, and four or five crackers get together to abuse it.
This isn't the way most of us are used to thinking about Linux-security, but if a new virus-type for Linux systems pop up in the news every month, people will start considering Linux poorly developed.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
*this is what caused many problems for Windows and other platforms:
Conflicts and incorrect access caused all sorts of bugs. There's an old joke that sort of makes Linux looks like Windows:
Windows is a 32bit operating system on a 16bit shell with 8bit code meant for 4bit processors that doesn't make two bits of sense which can't stand one bit of competition and it's all half-assed. Someone will correct the errors in this, I'm sure...I don't remember it perfectly on the fly, but the first three or four parts are what I was referring to.
**is implant nearly the whole kitten-kaboodle to run out of the kernel: yes, that should be to implant...
This can be seen in 2000 and the upcoming WindowsXP. Ironically, this reduces the resources required to run the GUI by nearly 400%, a number I just now pulled out of Jesse Burst's A*. This is really ironic, since Mircosoft operating systems aren't known for resource conservation.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
But it's not "my ditty," and I didn't get it right in the first place. Though I've since been corrected as to how this particular "ditty" is meant to be written, and can quite easily tell you which processor it is meant to refer to, I will not simply because it is relatively common enough that YOU could figure it out yourself, as in, find the answer. Perhaps I may tell you, but it'll be in the last few minutes before no new posts can be made to this article. Sure, it's childish, but I get that way when someone feels the need to post something relatively useless and considerably off-topic anonymously.
It's ironic too, since I was just having a post to post discussion this week about your very right to whine about something nearly as useless as MS Windows95, itself.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Let's be optimistic and assume that RedHat will achieve profitability through its support services for businesses running RedHat Linux.
Would it then make sense for RedHat to use some of its resources to help intensify the struggle towards desktop-readiness for Linux?
It seems to me that would be a good thing to do, since it could help expand the RedHat user community, ergo the customer base for RedHat's services... especially if Linux could become a viable desktop OS for larger enterprises, in which case RedHat, as the leading distro brand, would probably get the lion's share of support contracts.
Do you see this happening? Why or why not?
thanx.
- frosty
www.medienkunst.com
This Like That - fun with words!
Nonsense. Please mod down that question, we don't need to ask things about non issues.
If the developer of a GPL app. wanted to get paid they would not release stuff using the GPL.
Who do you think you are to come here an pretend you know what grown up programmers would like to do with their own code? (your "question" amounts to that as far as I am concerned).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you could incorporate 3 things from competing OSs at the desktop level (I am thinking Windows, MacOS, OS/2 and BeOS mainly) what would they be?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You have to read the GPL and that should answer your question.
It is completely ethical because the owner of the copyright grants you permission to redistribute the software and modify it(as long as you release the sopurce code).
Red Hat doe not sell the software, any one can download it for free from their website, they add a series of conveniences (printed manuals, installer, support, etc) that make worht pay the money for the packaged product they release.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A pimp. How appropriate. In other words, a guy who makes a profit by selling something that most people could get for free with a little effort.
What plans does RedHat have to at least make the OS secure by default - ie have systems set up by default to not be running externally accessable servers except where users have specifically enabled (which isn't the same thing as installed), to ensure there are no default passwords, and possibly to audit some of the more critical code that makes up the system, on the OpenBSD model?
--
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Do you think that the fact that the free software movement (not the open source movement) are driven by political (socialist) motives is a problem? Will the masses like talk about politics when all they want is just an OS to run on their computers?
I'm not sure what you are talking about but my question is about the ethics in selling something that someone has released for free.
"Software per se.. they are selling a service, "
So...? The service is fully built around this product.
I still think it is an important question and it would be interesting to hear Young's view on this.
I have read the GPL.
I certainly don't think its ethical. The service is after all fully built on this product. Does it really matter one bit that technically it isn't the product itself?
Shouldn't companies like redhat that sells software that other people have made for free contribute economically to those individuals and their families?
You have some in-house developers but overall you haven't paid much for your product (and your service that is build on that product).
It seems quite unethical that (at least for your redhat os boxes) you take all the revenue but don't pay anything to its developers and inventors.
Don't they deserve to get paid?
Does this have anything to do with linux graphics and multimedia format, ie.. SDL?
What effect will an open high quality multimedia codebase mean for the ability of commercial media clients to adopt it?
Isn't this the final nail in css's coffin?
;-)
I considder myself to be a "big picture thinker". Success is 20 years from now, not some overly-hyped fad. There *most* *definately* is a trend in IT twards redhat. Most companies develop on it. Most people use it. Most private developers have switched to redhat because of it's support in the linux comunity.
My question is, will redhat (as a corporation) quash it's compeditors, or work with them to increase the value of all offerings?
-EvilMonkeyNinja
a.k.a. Joseph Nicholas Yarbrough
Security Grunt by Day
Programmer by Night
-EvilMonkeyNinja
Mild Mannered Host by Day
Wild Hammered Programmer by Night
There was a lot of finger pointing, but don't think the truth ever came out.
Why exactly was the beta gcc put in Redhat?
It seems there would have to be a serious reason to justify using it. Most companies put out software for redhat, that users of other distros can run dispite it being developed on redhat. Making a binary incompatability between redhat and the rest of the world is a pritty big step that looks to be monopolistic. I just want to know what technical reason required it to be done in the first place.
-EvilMonkeyNinja
a.k.a. Joseph Nicholas Yarbrough
Security Grunt by Day
Programmer by Night
-EvilMonkeyNinja
Mild Mannered Host by Day
Wild Hammered Programmer by Night
Dear Bob,
Considering that Microsoft seems primed for a takedown and the world is ready and waiting for a paradigm shift, why doesn't someone make it a prime priority to make linux easier to use and install for the masses?? *One* desktop paradigm a no-brainer install and network set-up and bundled and installed with the 3 killer apps that the lay-people seem to want (ie. word processer, spreadsheet, simple database).
Seems to me that Microsoft is marketing increasingly with the corporate world in mind - someone needs to marlet "an operating system for the people".
Why not you?
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Linux does have a presence in the software isles -- spend 50 to 100 US and you can walk out with the latest box of your favorite distribution as long as it's RedHat (ok, ok, they have a few other options on the shelf as well).
Or is it a lawsuit waiting for a big player to support it to make it happen?
I.E.: would supporting WINE be the death of RedHat?
VMWare -- the safest way to experience an alternative OS without disturbing the base machine.
I know you can buy pre-configured servers with Linux. Workstations are available but a little harder to get. The major desktop players are NOT pushing Linux on the desktop in the US market -- they may have announced product (in rare cases) but don't seem to be peddling it hard.
My issue with Penguin or VALinux or any of the other Linux shops is just this: If I'm going to pay first tier prices ala Compaq or HP I want a Compaq or HP where the chance that the vendor will be in business tommorrow is relatively good. VALinux has some great looking hardware but why wouldn't I buy Compaq at a similar price where I know the infrastructure is in my neighborhood to support it? VA does NOT compete with custom boxes (i.e.: build my own's) on price. It is aimed more at the corporate structure but the issue remains -- why buy from a second or third tier vendor at first tier vendor pricing?
A lot of CEO's spend a lot of their time trying to "work deals"--partnerships, big contracts, co-branding, etc. A lot of these deals produce nothing, or next to it. But some of these deals are spectacular successes that propel a company into the stratosphere (on more than just paper).
What do you think RedHat's "dream deal" would be?
--
324006
In most of the posts regarding GNU/Linux on Slashdot, I so often get the impression that most of the people who are new (and a few who aren't) to the GNU/Linux system just 'don't get it' with regards to my perception of what it's greatest strengths perhaps are. Basically, that the GNU/Linux System, in "vanilla" source code form is a huge "jar-of-clay" that developers can dip into to mold what they need to from. Some clarification, for example, when you purchase or download Red Hat 7.0 (or Debian, or Suse, etc.), what you are getting is an operating system and applications derived from the GNU/Linux (and other) sources. However, because of the development work that all of the distro's put in their respective releases , these distributions are perhaps to be seen as separate systems that are compatible, rather than different flavors of the same cup of coffee. What I'm getting at is that "Linux" should not be seen as "Linux" but rather the Red Hat System, or the Debian System etc, etc, and that over time they will grow divergent, not in terms of a "fork" or incompatability (as I believe everyone will stay sane and make sure that this does not happen), but in terms of look, feel and flavor as the in-house codebase grows (RPM and apt would be a good example of this, after all, although using someone elses tool is useful and quick, writing your own gets you exactly what you want). Would you agree with me that this is perhaps what will elevate GNU/Linux (and other bits) over most other OS's out there (as is happening in the embedded space) and that we can expect more and more "sub distributions", some developed in-house inside corporate walls or scientific institutions as the shared, GPL derived communal codebase grows and people are able to drill down to the exact subset of functionality they need for each of their secretaries workstations or polar-orbiting satellites.
I have noticed that it seems like it's taking longer for Red Hat to produce releases. I have been a faithful Red Hat user for over three years now. I have purchased several releases while I could have donwloaded them, but decided against it as I wanted to put money into the Linux community. I have tried other distros, but have always come back because I like the way Red Hat does certain things etc. It seems like Red Hat is kind of falling behind e.g. Suse has had 2.4.x along with a journaling file system for some time now. I was actually considering trying the new Suse out but decided against it because of their corporate policy. I was going to download it and if it did what I needed I was honestly going to buy it however, after I saw their attitude I decided against it.See 3/27 So here I am waiting for 7.1 to be released. What is the hold up for Red Hat 7.1 ? Why does it seem like it is taking longer between releases ? I have tried many JFS systems, but what journaling file system do you think will be the future standard for the Red Hat distro?
As a long time Linux supporter (and a long time Red Hat and Debian user), I've never been very interested in Windows - until now, with the coming of Windows XP, which, quite honestly, appears as though it will completely head us off at the desktop. My question is this - what do you think the viability is of dedicating *serious* work to a project to make Linux *the* desktop. Example: work on the USB support in the kernel, as well as support for digital cameras and additions to GIMP so that a user could open a picture directly off a camera in GIMP (or whatever app) instead of first downloading them? Add a completely integrated File Manager that is both powerful and easy to use (we really don't have this yet). Graphical configuration of *EVERYTHING*, and make it *simple* for the end user. A group of very talented hackers would need to be set up to do this, and it would probably require some forks, but if OEM support could be leveraged and Windows programs could be run using WINE (but the end user wouldn't need to *know* we were using WINE), it's possible we could make serious ground. Do you think this could ever happen?
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
Are there any plans for Redhat to enter into agreements with PC manufacturers to provide preconfigured, supported, possibly dual boot, 'Redhat Inside' computers, in much the same way that Penguin operates in the US?
--
Murky
Murky
A wannabe geek with no money to geek with.
Red Hat gets a lot of flak for security, and I was wondering if you guys had seen bastille linux? Have you considered using it, or something similar of your own to educate users about security when they sit down to their first linux installation?
[haven't you tried FunWithPerl?]
As a currently invested RedHat Linux stockholder, I would like to know your reaction to the class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday which accuses RedHat of misleading investors in relation to its initial public offering.
NDS would make a great addition to the RedHat Army! Please buy the sinking ship that is Novell and turn that product around by porting NDS over to RedHat!
Does RedHat think there will be a "killer app" that will allow Linux to finally outsell Microsoft in terms of OS market share?
Also, what about your new version of RedHat Linux called "Myanus"?
------ 1001001
One of the key points raised in the Microsoft interview was that a paucity of desktop apps is holding down Linux market share. As a business owner I consider the point valid. What is your take on the Linux desktop apps question and what can RedHat (and/or other Linux companies) do to motivate developers to build new or port existing apps?
After reading the previous slashdot reply from Doug Miller I must say
:(
that being a well educated geek I agree that being financially rewarded
for by abilities is very nice.
It also strikes me that with the expectation of the Linux community that
software be free, it makes Linux a non-opertune target environment for my
projects. I have read various texts by ESR with respect to business models
in open source. Although it seems that marketing being what it is (4),
there are more people willing to pay for software on wintel than Linux,
and thus more ability to be able to code and still pay rent etc.
Although I have recently ignored by above paragraph and both targeted
Linux as my release platform and GPLed the code. I am also aware that in
doing this I have set in place an unsustanable lifecycle (5).
So my question is this:
Given that employment opertunities are drying up for career Linux
hackers (1), and that rapid development of desktop Linux would require
hackers to devote a lot of time to improving what is available (2),
how do you see the future of Linux as a desktop OS
given that the market for wintel and OSX developers offers so much
more remuneration and demand (3) than Linux?
(1) advents such as VA dropping 1/4 staff and Eazel 1/2 staff.
(2) KDE, GNOME, and e (e17 and all deps) are a great start, but
there is always so many things that are needed any nobody has the
time to do them. Eg Bonobo and gevas based streaming animation,
evas based emacs view edit
(3) for example the demand for ActiveX developers is so universal
with respect to Bonobo developers
(4) Largely the capitialization of other peoples ignorance.
(5) Shameless plug: see gevas and witme
What free software projects would Bob Young recommend us to help in our free time?
In particular, do you think that it would be
good to have a windows emulator that (unlike
Wine) works with all applications?