Microsoft's Chief Linux Strategist Interviewed

sl0wp0is0n writes "Computerworld has published an interview with Microsoft's chief Linux strategist, Martin Taylor. It's interesting to find out that Microsoft thinks and predicts Novell (SuSE) will be the dominant Linux distribution they'll have to compete against. The interview also has Taylor talking about indemnification, IBM and his realization that customers generally adopt Linux to get a better TCO than Unix, not Windows."

Comments

Broken

[Epeeist]

Personally I wouldn't pay attention to an organisation that can't even put together a web site properly.

And no, I'm not talking about /.

Re:This has got to please IBM...not

[demachina]

I guess I'm willing to concede that Red Hat's business model MIGHT play well with the stuffed shirts who sit in the CxO office and spend more time thinking about their golf game than their business.

But, I should think most in the geek community should have had their fill of Red Hat and the business model at this point. If the geeks are dead set against Red Hat there is a least a chance the CxO's wont go that route.

The two key places Red Hat burned their bridges:

A) Red Hat starts this cool little subscription service for end users, I buy a year's subscription and they for all practical purposes killed the OS I'm using and the update service six months in to my subscription. Welching on paid subscriptions, and failing to support their distributions, is a really bad indicator and should give pause to any business paying a bucketload of money for basically the same kind of service. If they've welched on their services once they are more than capable of doing it again.

B) Its more than a little cynical for them to dump most of their non money making distribution development on community volunteers in Fedora, expect them to work for free, and Red Hat still takes it as their prerogative to dictate everything that happens in Fedora. If you are working for a money making corporation expect payment or don't do it. There are plenty of freer distributions around where you can donate your time and get paid with control over your project based on the merits of your contribution, if nothing else.

I just finished nuking all but one ancient 7.3 Red Hat distribution off my machines, couldn't be happier and am not looking back. Gentoo rocks. If the whole Gentoo team and their servers fell off the face of the earth I could still do essential updates to my installed machines and maintain them without much problem indefinitely. There is a lot of blather about the "freedom" of Linux but if your letting yourself get locked in to the whims and tyrannies of distro developers you really don't have as much freedom as you think, especially when the distro developer is mostly trying to make their quarterly numbers to keep Wall Street happy and will screw any customer necessary to achieve that end.