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SuSE CEO's Two-Distro World
FrankoBoy writes "CRN has an interview with SuSE CEO Richard Seibt in which he claims such things as 'Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else.' Another example of this kind of corporatespeak can be found in another interview he did with ZDNet last week. DistroWatch has an article about all this in its current weekly newsletter."
Does the general /. public know what is going with Novell and Ximian? (apart from the Netware admins). This is what one Netware admin had to say:
... This is a competitive advantage to Windows because this is not something you can get with [Windows].
Novell needs a new loading OS kernel to build Netware on. DOS certainly has reached it limitations with scalability and security so linux is an obvious solution. They'll still maintain their same environment and NDS tho. But scalability is their main push. E-Directory (NDS) loads on WinNT/2k/2K3 and linux.... but keeping it in its native environment is still the most stable of course.
And the CEO's answer to a question:
CRN: What do you think of Novell buying Ximian? Does this bode well for Linux adoption on the desktop? Seibt: I would take this as a fact that Novell is taking Linux very, very seriously, and it's another fact that they are not concerned about any lawsuit. They simply believe that Linux is something that is a huge value for the customer. Think about what CA [Computer Associates] just did. They did a survey with their customers about why customers are deploying Linux. [Customers] named five reasons: performance, reliability, scalability, security and total cost of ownership, which came in fifth. What does this mean? Everybody is talking about total cost of ownership, and no doubt this is very important, because all of us have to reduce IT budgets. But customers named four other reasons. These reasons are strategic reasons why to deploy Linux.
Well what?
Mandrake is most certainly a company. In fact, I remember reading somewhere that they've been doing quite well recently and may even be able to drop the Chapter 11 status by the end of the year.
-- Kircle
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE. If you buy a pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor somewhere, it will have RedHat or SuSE on it. This is basically true.
So don't jump the gun on tearing this guy a new asshole.
Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors.
Thats bullshit.
HP/Compaq bundles Mandrake.
And certifies systems for Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, and TurboLinux.
If HP isn't considerd a "large IT vendor," who is?
The unofficial
Okay, everybody calm down.
First of all, I really don't think that this interview was very interesting.
What seems to have gotten it onto Slashdot was his "only two distros" comment. However, what the person submitting the story left out was one minor detail: context.
He said HP, Sun, etc., are mostly backing off from pushing their own proprietary operating systems and opting to push Linux-based products. In that context, there are two highly relevant Linux distributions: Redhat and SuSE.
Can you name another distro with the resources to provide support to a major hardware vendor deploying Linux?
Isn't it amazing how much less interesting and inflammatory his comment seems with a little context surrounding it?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
I'd be one of those new Gentoo users. I've been slowly transitioning over to it for about a week after having spent 3 years or so piddling with Mandrake and RedHat. (As a side note, I still feel that MDK is the best distro around for Linux newbs). I'm thoroughly impressed with it, and I can see why people have been making such a big deal out of Portage. I've come to feel that Gentoo is the perfect distro for the Newb++, as I've learned many things about Linux I had never known before venturing into this, despite considering myself an "intermediate" user.
:) I think it's this type of flexibility that attracts me to it - You can turn Gentoo into pretty much anything you want it to be.
Being able to start from Stage 1 really teaches you a lot about the system, while a Stage 3 (pre-compiled) install allows you to quickly deploy a system and take advantage of the Portage without waiting a full day for KDE to compile.
I think Gentoo is definitely going to be my distro of choice from now on.
Suse and Redhat are the only ones who are DoE and DoD certified (along with ISO, etc.) that is necessary in many areas. These certs can cost millions and I don't see anyone else willing to pony up to get into this market.
OTOH, for a small office, just about any distro (NetBSD on the server, yeah) if administered well, would be good.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
He's right, there are 2 linux business operating system companies now, Suse and Redhat. If I was to ask Dell, HP, or IBM if Mandrake ran on their servers, they'd say "Maybe but don't ask for it in writing", for Suse or RedHat you get an answer of "This range of servers are all certified to work with RedHat Advance Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Server"
If I want to buy some hardware + software, the only way to get a certified setup with Linux is to buy either Redhat or Suses server products at about $1000. For people running large Oracle or DB2 databases on IBM xSeries or Dell Poweredge servers, this is what they need.
His quote carries on with "There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors". I saw HP were supporting Debian while Bruce Perens was there, but now looking on the HP site everywhere it is RedHat or Suse.
There's definitely going to be more desktop linux vendors, but a lot of them still ride on top of Redhat or Debian, and again a lot of them cater for specific markets.
So, lookes like SeSE has found SCO's secret stash, and/or borrowed Steve Jobs's reality distortion field.
Mandrake makes a decent all-around box (server or desktop), Slackware makes a great server, Debian has its' following, etc.
I work for a medium sized software company. We certify against Red Hat for our US customers and SuSE for our German customers. We certify against specific releases. For our customers, Linux is either Red Hat or SuSE, and they (and us) refer to those distros' version numbers, not the kernel.
We simply couldn't gurantee things like version changes to glibc might break the small amount of native libraries we ship. PAM is a mess across various distros (so far, each distro needs to be documented separately for PAM setup of our app) and we've even found problems with consistent Java support.
Getting the software to work, and coding smart s only one part of the problem. The fact is that corporate customers expect their product to be QA'd, and QA takes time and money. They also expect technical support, and the time and cost to solve "what distro are you using" problems people may call in with is just not worth it. Maintaining a matrix of distro-patches-kernel-tweaks-hardware issues for any and all distro would be nigh on impossible to do properly. We've have to offer half-assed support and QA if we supported more than a handful of specific distros.
Then there are the services. We have to keep things like LDAP and NIS in a known state, and each distro has it's own disitinct flavour. And the third-parties. We depend on some third-party apps, and these must be certified, at the right level, for each distro, for these exact same reasons. Most enterprise solutions do not exist in a vacuum; most depend on a whole slew of third-party app and integrations into services and devices. Open standards can only go so far in the real world (we've found).
Sorry; I love Linux, but corporate customer have far different needs than I do in my cubicle at work, or on my play box at home. There are just too many unknowns to risk fubarring our customers world. These unknowns exist whether or not an app is well-designed and properly robust.
This is not to say we won't support Debian or Gento or whatever. It just means that until you come along and ask us to support one of those distros or platforms, we will not certifiy it with our app suite. We've done it for FreeBSD for one single customer. We need a business case to proceed with a new platform, and we've found that each distro can behave as if it was just another UNIX platform for us: it needs to be smoke-tested and QA'd, or it will break at the exact wrong moment for our customers.
-- clvrmnky
While many vendors do support other distributions than the big two (RH & SuSE) this is mostly on the desktop. Support on the server side for large servers is pretty much restricted to these two. This is true for hardware also If you want support for larger SMP's, SAN, etc there are not many drivers for other distros. Usually you can just go ahead and try, but if something does not work the support line will tell you to replace your distro xxx with RH/SuSE where thei support it.
I've been involved in quite a few new Linux customer projects. All the time third party software (Oracle, SAP, DB2, etc) was involved as well. The only distros which are *certified* to run this stuff are Rh and SuSE. And customers do want certified installations !
Personally I'm happily running debian and gentoo, but I haven't come across commercial installation of these distributions yet.
Markus
...All press about the management of Lindows, points towards them being interested in bettering linux. Mandrake caters to it's consumers and redhat is a company that gives back to it's community. Suse seems to be out only for their benefit and while they might make a good product, I don't want to support their business style....
Sorry to rain on your parade, but you're into serious bullshitting territory here.
SuSE (~300 employees) has a subtancial amount of fulltime developers programming OSS day-in and day-out. They pretty much did Alsa by themselves, they did something like 90% of United Linux and they are the ones in the market offering the biggest value for the least money. They've translated big parts of the linux documentation into german and offer a solid service that goes beyond just having a cardboard box. A box with the largest paperdocumentation on a linux distro, I might add. Shure SuSE wants to make a buck, but stating that they're only focusing on their benefit and not giving back anything of substance is just plain silly.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca