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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."
SCO isn't a company. Debian and Gentoo aren't companies. Is Mandrake? Is there any other companies out there rolling their own distro?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
But I would leave out Red Hat and SuSE too. Linux doesn't "mean" any companies! Linux means a stable, reliable, nimble, free OS.
:)
Of course, my years of using and contributing to Debian (which is not a company) may have skewed my viewpoint somewhat.
Does anyone actually run SuSE Linux outside of Europe? If so, why? Red Hat is basically the Linux standard distro if you want to run commercial software, and Mandrake is simple to install and run for newbies. What does SuSE bring to the table?
/joeyo
2^5
There are always groups of people who swear Maxtor blows and WD never fails, or Redhat installs on any hardware and Mandrake does not work on any.
The bottom line is, most distros work on most hardware without significant problems. There will always be fanboys who cry for years because they had one or two bad experiences with a Distro.
Especially about red hat. Red hat is the closest to a profitable, properly run, professional company in the linux world. Suse is quite respectable too, and they have a great product to back it up. While other linux distros do matter, they don't show up on the professional radar for most people.
Arguing about whether or not to use GNU in your name, or which GUI is more "free" than the other is irrelevant to most companies. They want good products, not irrelevant nerd-speak. Red Hat and Suse have forged past the anarchistic free-for-all attitude of hackers and made Linux much more approachable. Anyone who says otherwise is probably just jealous of their success...
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Granted there are all kinds of linux flavors and distro under the sun, but walking down the street in anytown USA you ask any given person "hay you ever heard of linux?" or "could you tell us the name of a linux distribution/company you have heard of?" and most common answers will be Redhat, Suse, and Mandrake - in that order.
Red Hat has pushed Linux into the spot light more than any other company has - ok this is where I get flamed - but honestly what companies other than Red Hat have targeted more than the fat-guru-programmer stereotype nix user. Gentoo and Slackware definaetly don't expect anyone but a power user to even touch there distros. Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt. Red Hat and Suse are the only 2 companies that have successfully made money selling linux to both corporations and home users, and of the 2 Red Hat is by far more "KNOWN"
Ave Molech Setting
I think too much is being read into this comment. For one, it's obvious English is not this guy's first language from the text. Secondly, he seemed to be addressing Linux as it pertained to larger corporations. As far as large companies go, Suse and Red Hat likely ARE the only two distros they're really concerned with. They're the ones that have the parterships with the likes of IBM and Sun after all. He's not delusional - he's just not talking about what everyone seems to think he is.
"You can take our lives, but you can never take our Flerbage!!!!"
quote was taken out of context - SuSE's just saying that corporate IT is focusing on just two distributions.
Don't know about you - but I see very few other distributions out there on corporate boxes...
All he's saying is that in the corporate market most of the support is related to these two companies. Personally I think he's wrong, but he's not trying to deny the existance of other distros or anything.
If you look at this, it's wrong no matter how you interpret it. Literally, he left out a damned big company - IBM. Yes, they use Red Hat's stuff, but to say "Linux means two companies - Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else" is just flat wrong on that basis.
If you want to be assume he meant distros, then obviously he left out like 50.
You would have to interpret that as "companies who release their own distros under their own name" for that to make any sense, but by that time, it's irrelevant. The major players aren't the companies making the distros, it's those like IBM getting it on machines. Among companies with distros, only Red Hat (not SuSE!) has had any real impact doing that. SuSE's penetration is far less, especially outside Deutschland.
So, to me, the only sense in which his statement is true is that in which it's barely relevant. Sorry to SuSE, but they have nowhere near the impact of Red Hat or IBM.
Ultimately, he's trying to sound as if SuSE is half of the non-MS world, and that's nowhere near the case
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
It doesn't matter whether Red Hat and SUSE are most popular right now, maybe they deserve to be.
What's most important is that with Linux there is no way that they can prevent any other company that decides to step up and bring a distro to market.
This fact will keep them on their toes via the omnipresent shadow of the unknown competitor just around the corner and it means that even if they decide to abandon Linux ten years from now, any of the other distros can come in a take up the slack.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I'm not sure if you are mentioning Linux style /proc because you think it's bad or because you think it's good?
/proc. And you can do things like /proc/pid/fd. Most modern Unix-like operating systems have /proc for viewing processes. Solaris and QNX do, I know that for certain. proc stands for PROCess
/proc by making it some kind of kernel configuration interface like Linux does. BSD uses sysctl interface to control kernel options (like the number of file descriptors for example).
/proc/ is a real shame, also if you've ever written a kernel module in linux that provided /proc you'd notice that there is some very peculiar behavior. For example you can't just dynamically allocated each line, you have to just allocate a buffer of data ahead of time, fill it in and ship it off to /proc. Otherwise you'll end up with some really terrible race conditions where data might change in mid-read. Also Linux /proc system information files are not seekable, with is another inconvience.
Anyways. First part, is BSD does have
BSD doesn't overload
The way Linux has overloaded
The proper way to do a lot of these things would to use an ioctl on the device that the information would be associated with. And that's generally how most operating systems deal with it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm not so sure about that. I think it was taken out of (or beyond its) context, although I do find the sentiment somewhat brusque. The companies that *are* starting to distribute linux on servers and now desktops are working mainly with Red Hat and Suse, who make most of their money from support services the corporations rely upon. That's just a fact right now - corps want another corp they can bitch at. If they were smart, they'd bring in a few savvy admins, use a free distro and pay *them* for support. But there's that whole "If they were smart" condition, applied to corporate IT no less...
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
After seeing all the outraged comments on here ("Waddyamean he thinks my copy of Gentoo isn't a distro?!"), I'm surprised, because I think he's right (at least, in terms of corporate distros). Before any holy warriors mod me down for saying this, I should provide a disclaimer...OK...here goes...I am a distro bigot, and I would never use anything but Slackware (if it's my decision to make), because all the major distros are disgustingly bloated. Slackware -- it rocks. RH/SuSE/etc -- they suck. Just the facts, ma'am. *ducks*
Now that we've got that important fact out of the way, let's look at Oracle. Last I checked, Slackware, Gentoo, and other distros that lean further toward the hobbyist/programmer/hacker end of things were not supported by Oracle -- it was only SuSE and RedHat. It's not just Oracle -- as a general rule, if you find some proprietary software that they're trying to make a Linux port of, and they name a distro, it's about 90% likely to "support" RedHat and maybe 40% likely to "support" SuSE.
Reason for the quotes around "support" would be that most of the time, a specific distro is not needed. It's the same kernel and most of the same FS setup (well, Slackware's init scripts are a little bit bett^H^H^H^Hdifferent, since they follow BSD instead of SysV). However, naming the distro supplies a corporation with the perfect ass-covering if it's something their tech-support hasn't been trained on. "What, you don't use RedHat? Well, I'm sorry, but we can't support your software. Even though you paid us $5,000 this quarter for gold-level support. It's broken -- you fix it."
It comes of picking something very specific to train $6.50/hr helpdesk personnel who aren't likely to investigate and learn a new distro. Plus a reason I can sympathize a bit more with: If the customer is breathing down the company's neck to fix this problem that they had with a homebrew distro some BOFH in the customer's IT dept. crafted, it will cost a lot of time, money, and perhaps contracts (as the customer gets more impatient) to get it fixed. Better to go with an extremely common standard, even though they are the lowest common denominator in terms of distros.
So I agree -- to the corporate world, there are only SuSE and RedHat distros. The rest just aren't supported.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
You mean "alternative" as in "same old shit with a different name"? Was that horribly poor comparison on purpose?
XML causes global warming.
Basically, this is another non-story.
When the new genereation of UDMA 66 drives came out (iirc), appearently lilo wasn't ready, if I had a 33, it would have been happy. It was one of those things after the fact, so, I go with lilo, it all looks ok, then the next step of the install mysteriously craps out, so I go to boot into windows to do some email, check out some documentation etc. And that crapped out too. Fortunately, the disk utilites that came with the harddrive did a nice job of planning for just such an emergency. But it was annoying. Turns out that this was a known problem with lilo at the time, but mandrake thought it'd be best to try to bury it, as opposed to prominently mention it.
Tools are far from perfect. And they occasionally fail, even when used as intented.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Debian/Gentoo vs. Redhat/Suse/Mandrake.
wouldn't it be:
Debian/Gentoo/Slackware vs. Redhat/Suse/Mandrake
Slackware is a major player, and many people still use it.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
"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."
Tough to argue with that.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
I definitely agree with you that the optimizations aren't the real reason to use Gentoo. Right now, the learning process is key to me, later on, the package management is what's going to keep me hooked. Remember, I'm coming from the Redhat-based world of RPM hell, so Portage is a huge step forward for me. It may not be the absolute best, but I like it. :)
:) Either way, right now, Gentoo is turning out to be the perfect distro for my current needs, and that's what matters. It may not be perfect for others, but hey, that's why we have so many different distributions. It's all about choice.
Really, what I'm enjoying right now is the fact that I know exactly what's on the machine, and that I can add or remove packages at will with a single, simple command line call. Or that I can check for updates and patch them just as easily.
Most people do focus on the "from source" nature of Gentoo, but that's really only a small part of it. Gentoo's still a relatively young distribution, and I think that it's yet to fully define itself. I think that as it matures, there will still be a bleeding edge aspect to it, but that it may very well more drift towards an Unstable/Testing/Stable type system much like Debian. Really, it's already starting to happen - the ~x86 keyword for example, and the "heresy" of distributing binaries.
Ya know, I'm not sure was his reasoning was, but there's always been a correlation in my mind between the two as well, and I'm not really sure as to why. I think it's a combination of sharing traits like their respective packaging systems and that similar types of people seem to be attracted to either of the distros. From what I could tell at the time, many early adopters of Gentoo seemed to be former Debian users. So really, I guess that's where that common bond comes from - both are driven forward by a community of motivated volunteers rather than guided along by a corporation who may make arbitrary decisions for the community. (See: RH Bluecurve).
[..]Debian was developed specifically to counter "Linux Companies"[..] That, my dear Twitter, is complete nonsence. Please read the retrospective by the founder of Debian himself. When the Debian project was started, there were no other distro types!