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Sun's COO Pretends Linux Belongs To Red Hat
An anonymous reader writes "Ever mindful of minting phrases likely to spread virally through the Net, reports JDJ, Jonathan Schwartz's blogging gifts were used Friday to assert that "it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux." The article comes up with a new angle on one of the most-talked about members of the tech-exec digerati, saying of Schwartz: "He's the Winston Churchill of technology - he mobilizes the English language at least once a week, and sends it into battle against Sun's rivals." But Churchill would never have tried to pull a fast one by disingenuously describing Linux as "Red Hat's Linux" - the community will upbraid him, for certain. Churchill Schmurchill, Schwartz is a technology mischief-maker not a technology statesmen."
What about Novell? They bought Suse which was a strong distro, and Ximian which holds the track-record for providing cool UI's for Linux.
What are their ambitions? They have a couple of very nice cards to play - why don't they?
On another, but related, note, what made FreeBSD (as OS X) the success it became once Apple added UI? The Apple brand and hardware? What does it take for Novell to get the same level of recognition?
A worried shareholder..
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Geocrawler error message.
So what? Linux distros are compatible enough that only the most old-school care about whether Red Hat or Debian or Novell or whoever have more "market share". The only thing that's interesting is how many people are using Linux vs XYZ platform.
I've not seen any hard statistics on this because there aren't any. You cannot count Linux installations, so it's pointless trying to use statistics to prove a point here. In my world (a university) I'd say I know more people using Linux than using Macs, just, but that's probably because it's a university. If I worked at a design house I'd probably have to say the opposite.
Anyway, I think the comment applies to servers. With IBM selling its PC division, the company will be heavily committed to Unix-likes for survival - M$ may be the 300 pound gorilla, Sun sees itself as a raptor, but IBM is a tyranosaurus - no speed but lots of weight and sizable claws. It's a dangerous mistake to count out the animal that is too big to see :)
This is not a signature.
This is clearly just a Sun bigot wishing they were more successful in the marketplace.
I think that a more interesting comparison is between *nix-derived systems and Windows. That would lump Solaris, Linux (all flavors), BSD (all flavors, including OS X), and AIX into one pool, which is sizeable enough to make a definite presence on Microsoft's radar.
Unfortunately, Sun has the ear of lots of the UNIX community in the corporate realm, including the PHBs and admins who still think Linux is a toy. There are, unfortunately, a lot of them with their heads in the sand. That is why I run Linux on my U5 at the office... and remind them of how fast and stable it is fairly often ;)
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Hint : these are not posessions
No... no no no.
A "kernel" is nothing more than THE fundamental piece of an operating system. Its sole purpose is to provide interaction between other peices of the operating system and the bare metal of the hardware in a secure, standard way.
The operating system, on the other hand, is responsible for not only interfacing with the hardware (via a kernel), it is responsible for loading and managing user level applications such as shells and mouse daemons and whatnot.
In fact, the difference can be highlighted by pointing out that there is, technically, no reason you couldn't run an operating system without a kernel. If things like bash just worked directly on the hardware, you could forgo your kernel altoghter. Likewise, if all you have is a kernel, you can't do anything. You need the other pieces of the operating system to actually do anything useful.
'linux' is a kernel. On its own, it is mostly useless for any practical purpose.
Red Hat is an entire operating system. Without a kernel, it becomes useless.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!