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."

Comments

I almost agree with him

[Xtifr]

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. :)

He's right

[GoatPigSheep]

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...

He does have a point....

[greymond]

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"

Misinterpretation... Calm down!

[dopplex]

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.

try reading the article

[kpharmer]

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...

Most importantly

[foniksonik]

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.

I think he's right

[Kphrak]

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.

Interesting - a troll embedded in an article.

[Bun]

'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.

Trying to stir up a little controversy? It seems the quote is deliberately shortened. If you include the next sentence, Richard Seibt is merely stating the obvious:
"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.