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. :)

The whole quote isn't nearly as bad

[hidden]

It's my view that the industry has decided there is one main operating system competitor to Microsoft, and that is Linux. 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.

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.

Re:The whole quote isn't nearly as bad

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

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.

A bit inflammatory, no?

[Otter]

[H]e claims such things as 'Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else.'

C'mon -- the guy is a non-native English speaker and the context makes it perfectly clear what he's saying. He said that from the perspective of commercial Unix vendors, there are two Linux distributions they actively consider.

I'm a Gentoo and Yellow Dog user, but the shrieking in just the first 10 comments is completely misplaced.

RTFA.

[pclminion]

The guy said that RedHat and SuSE are the two distributions that are going to be supported by IT vendors for the forseeable future. The guy isn't claiming that RedHat and SuSE are the only two Linux distros, that would be utterly insane.

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.

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...

more knee-jerk fodder...

[hankaholic]

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?

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.

Right and wrong

[markus_baertschi]

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

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.