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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 manage serveral servers for a small sized ISP. Mod me down, but over the time since RedHat released their Enterprise line, I have felt that RedHat was going into the dark. People have become skeptical over their support schemes which they blatantly charge for. Their packages and applications have become too "closed" and again, somewhat dependent on RedHat Enterprise, period. We now prefer OpenBSD and FreeBSD over Linux. We call it simplicity over formality, not that it is all that is to it. Distributions like slackware or debian and the BSD flavors out there works just great and they are more flexible than RedHat Enterprise is. Besides, setting up and maintaining RedHat Enterprise is simply not much fun either!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I agree and I think it goes beyond this. Suse Linux is far more pragmatic than Red Hat. We stopped using Red Hat Linux for one simple reason; it doesn't include the software that we use everyday. Suse Linux comes out of the box with: a Java VM, Flash, an MP3 codec, Adobe Acrobat, Conectiva drivers for win modems, NVidia drivers installable through their admin tool, Yast, and the list goes on.
I think the difference is that Red Hat makes an open source Linux distribution and Novell makes a Linux distribution that solves people's problems today. Not all the software I want and need to use is open source. Red Hat wants us to either fork out a ton of cash to get the non-open source software we want and need or they want us to believe we're in this pipe dream thinking that what comes with Fedora is all we need.
Novell is already giving a lot to the open source community and they've proven they can develop enterprise software. Red Hat gives everything to the open source community and is trying to develop enterprise software. I am very pleased with the software Red Hat has produced but Novell has the better business model. Sure Novell might not make RMS happy but I don't pick my software on what makes one man happy. I pick my software on what will get the job done.