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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope
Brainsur writes "ZDNet reports about Redhat : European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act. While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism, the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community."
I disagree. I believe Red Hat makes quite a bit of their money from supporting their customers, than from just selling the software packages.
To most companies, the initial cost of software and hardware is not nearly as important as the long term support contract/plan. Many people thus choose Microsoft, because it provides support, while if you went with Debian, there is no support phone number to call when you run into problems.
And support is exactly why my ex-employer went with Red Hat, because he wanted to keep his x86 hardware, and also has the power of a UNIX system. I suggested using Slackware, because that's what I was running at the time, and he liked it. But after shopping around a bit, he decided to go with Red Hat because they provide support, and he is willing to pay $$$ for support.
Don't register your key. That'll keep it cheap. That, and find a good Yum or APT-Get repository, and you'll stay up-to-date. Yes, they have both out there for RHEL. All that you're purchasing with RHEL is a service contract that says that they'll come out and do maintenence on your RHEL computers without any additional charge.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Unstable and Testing are the Debian categories, because they concentrate on having a rock-solid system, as opposed to running recent software.
Testing level packages are (if I remember correctly, it's been a while since I used straight debian), are what most other distro's have had on their install CD's. Recent, but not the latest versions of the software, and may or may not require upgrading.
Unstable is the latest versions available on the apt-repository. They havent been though the months and years of testing and the like that the debian guys put stuff through.
If you don't like how they do this, but you want to use apt, you can try one of the other Debian based distro's out there (I use libranet) which combine the ease of use of the APT system, but using recent releases of the software. And you can select the level that you want to download from (apt-get -t testing/unstable install packagename)so you can download whatever version you want.
The only time I've had a problem running apt, was actually just yesterday, when I was trying to use their precompiled 2.6.8 kernel package, and all that required to fix was rebooting and selecting the default 2.4.21 kernel.
Asiide from that, my system has been solid.
Hmmmmm, let's see...
1. RPM. Read the Linux Standards Base documents?
2. Anaconda, the install/setup program.
3. Kudzu, the hardware detection system used by Knoppix and others.
I could continue, but I think those three on their own more than justify the company's existence, if nothing else.
While I will admit that as an overall distribution I was not overly enamoured of Red Hat 9, RH have contributed solutions to a number of vexing problems for us, and also carry on a very active development effort at sources.redhat.com.
I'm also detecting some of the usual commie whining (No, I don't think OSS is communist, but this is) about a company that's daring to actually make a large profit here...as if every company purely by virtue of its existence had to inevitably emulate Microsoft's bad behaviour. However, it might behoove you next time to be a little more sure of your facts before you start bitching.
Let's see. ...
They have many people daily working on the kernel.
They have many people daily working on glibc.
They have many people daily working on gtk.
They have many people daily working on gnome.
They have many people daily working on
>What is RedHat giving back to the Linux community on which it feeds?
They ARE a BIG part of the communty. Accept it.
The simple fact is that Debian is Linux. If you go look at Distro Watch you can plainly see that if you were to take Debian, Knoppix, DSL and Gentoo --which are all in the top ten-- all together as Debian you'd clearly have by far the biggest share of the distros and all of them are rising. There's no reason not to use Debian any more.
This certainly wasn't always true. When it was just Slackware, Debian and RedHat, RedHat was cool because RedHat was the only distro with a GUI installer, but those days are long gone.
Top it off with RedHat's screw the desktop user attitude and they don't really deserve any respect. Hey, if their attitude is take and no give then why should anybody care what happens to them. I put them right up there with Linspire. In a few years nobody will even remember who they were.
Yes, he's totally skimming over the more imporatant issues.
RedHat isn't out to save computing from Microsoft, the Spanish Inquisition, Sun, or any other perceived demon. RedHat is out to survive, and it's going to selfishly do so by nurturing the market which allows it to thrive. RedHat will never bleed itself dry, but they will offer up a few dollars (sacrificially) to keep the open source movement going.
It's like fishers not overfishing so they have something to eat next year. Or farmers letting a field lie fallow so they don't destroy the soil. It's planned alturisim for the greater purpose of succeeding. Which (wearing the right kind of glasses) is a fancy way of promoting long term selfishness. Note that fishers can (and do) let anyone drop their hook, but those with little skill will soon see it's much cheaper to buy at the market price.
And that's a very good thing, since short term selfishness usually burns through all your resources (finiancial and physical) leaving you with the need to move into another domain.
You are paying (1) to get updates, (2) for their warranty protection, (3) for the right to get tech support from Red Hat and (4) for the (limited) right to use their trademarks on your computer with the software. If those are of no value to you, then don't renew the subscription -- I think all you need to do is edit out their logos and name.
Red Hat's business model is built around adding value to Linux. If none of that added value means anything to you, then don't buy it.
With developers like this, who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.
European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act
::sigh:: Sorry if this sounds like a bashing session. I really enjoyed RedHat in the past. Yes, I did purchase quite a number of AS 2.1 and 3.0 servers. I'm supporting them (in case anyone asks).
I know this is going to sound bad but I really believe that Fedora was a big mistake. The previous RedHat releases IMO were MUCH more stable by a long shot than any of the Fedora releases I've used. It feels like alpha software at time. I know people who have had great success with Fedora. For some reason I'm just not all that happy with the uptime.
In all fairness I believe it's probably not all that bad. My experience with it however hasn't been all that great. I've been with RedHat since 4.1 came out. Since Fedora I've switched to other distros including SuSE, Debian and Open/Free/Net BSD.
I'm hoping they will either fix it before releases are available for use or simply dump Fedora and go back to the good old days.
Yes, I've been told Fedora isn't what you should be using for production. In the past I haven't had any problems with production environments running RedHat 7, 8 or 9. Now I wouldn't trust anything to Fedora. I've spent months working with it in a test lab and chatting up a storm on the mail lists.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com