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Red Hat CEO Szulik on Linux Distro Consolidation
Rob writes "Red Hat's CEO has rejected the idea that a reduction in the number of Linux
distributions would be good for the industry, and described Novell's acquisition of SUSE
Linux as "theatre". There are over 300 distributions listed on DistroWatch.com,
but Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, maintained that choice and
specialization outweighed any advantage that might be gained by focusing customer
attention on a smaller number of offerings. He was particularly disdainful of acquiring
other distributions for the sake of protecting or expanding market share. "We have
zero ambition to do that," he said. "I think when
people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural
selection.""
How does Novell, aquiring Suse, consist of theatre. They needed a distro on which to build their OES/NLD products, and since they seem to be partly in bed with IBM - who also uses Suse - that distro was the natural choice.
= Grow a brain...
Natural Selection vs. Intelligent Design
The debate rages on...
When it comes to natural selection, is consolidation banned from the game?
I read
and Novell is doing damn well here in Europe. Novell's acquisition of SUSE in particular was supposed to mount more of a challenge to Red Hat's dominant position as the leading enterprise Linux distributor, but Mr Szulik maintained that the purchase has had no identifiable impact on Red Hat's business No indetifiable impact. These guys are working their way into the German, Freanch and beleive me or not even the lame Dutch are beginning to sing songs on suSe.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Everyone has converged to the Red Hat family, the Debian/Ubuntu family, SuSe, Mandrake and Gentoo. The fact that Distrowatch has a zillion microdistros is irrelevant. (Please, do not pester me with Distrowatch popularity stats.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Since it wasn't clickable in the story, here is the distrowatch.com link.
Anti-whoring AC mode enabled for this post.
Well he can't very well call for "distribution consolidation" as that is a very Microsoft-ish thing to call for. There's certain things that even Big Linux can't call for without losing their Linux-cred.
It's like having to be hazed to get in a fraternity. No one really likes it, but you don't get in without it. I can just hear him squirming as his natural business executive instinct is to consolidate, but he's selling a product whose culture won't let him do it (yet). So for now, he smiles and yells, "Thank you, sir! May I have another (distribution)?!"
News at 11.
Seriously, does anybody expect Redhat's CEO to announce that "Novell is a serious contender, and Redhat is about to lose market advantage"?
Since Red Hat (for whatever reason) has had the lions share of the US corporate Linux market up to now, they have to spread a little FUD, as Novell has greater corporate name recognition than Red Hat. If I'm a PHB C?O, which distro do I use and buy support from? Hmmm, I've HEARD of Novell...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The truth is that the number of distros is good for the industry. Sure, it sets back Red Hat's bottom line, but a lot of people use Linux because it is free as in beer. The Debian distros in particular come very close to rivalling the "products" that Red Hat, et. al, distribute, and as far as support, "Google is your friend."
Szulik and company actually hurt their own sales when they decided to focus solely on the enterprise market and leave the smaller potatoes out to fend with Fedora. SuSe still offers a nice packages distro for those that want one, and they took a lot of the folks who had used Red Hat's products previous to their being abandoned. Others went with Debian, and some Fedora. None of these choices generate profits for Red Hat.
Sorry the little guys weren't big enough for you to worry about, Matt, but there are other choices in the Linux world to use. That may be bad for you, but it is good for us. And Matt, let's tell it like it is: you need us more than we need you. That's how FOSS works, so get used to it.
I really don't care if average people start migrating to Linux. I like what I'm using. I don't want what I'm using to be evolved into what Windows is now.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
If linux ever hopes to gain a fat chunk of the market share that windows enjoys then they'll have to target the "average" user. And the "average" user doesn't know how to begin picking a distro from over 300 choices. So if linux is ever to conquer windows (let's be honest, that's our ultimate fantasy) I think there will at least have to be one or two big name distros that focus on providing all of the trite functionality that the "average" user wants as well as ease of use/installation. There are definitely some good contenders in the linux distro world, but what the average user wants is "better" choices, not more.
... IMHO, of course.
...it's in his company's interest to have the rest of the market fragmented and redundant.
Theatre? He says that because Novell isn't fragmented and redundant and that's his competition, especially since SuSE Enterprise is undercutting RHEL in server deployments because of Redhat's absurd costs for it.
Competition is a wonderful thing, but in the real world the elephant doesn't have anything to worry about from the ant.
In what way does klik resolve dependenciess differently? That article claims it just overlays ontop of a .deb repository.
.deb hell is simply that people make an effort to be compatible with 'core' debian, and there has traditionally been more in debian (and contrib and friends) than redhat. rpms suffered when ximian, redhat, suse, mandrake et al packaged things differently.
I was also under the impression that the main reason there isn't
jh
You seem to be labouring under the misconception that the free software/open source communities see world domination or the destruction of Microsoft as an ultimate goal.
"you Linux people" are a disparate group of loosely connected individuals, pursuing their own goals and agendas. The only people interested in world domination in my experience are disgruntled Windows users and a fringe minority - not the software developers.
"There can be only one"
Good idea, but even if you talked the distros into doing it, 10 people would fork it after each duel off, resulting in 3,000 distros.
-everphilski-
I thought that the features from each distro had to be shared back to the community by virtue of the GPL. Any modifications are available to everyone. So, all the features are available to everyone, but "good features" is a relative term. There is no single Linux distro that can be everything to everyone, hence many of them. I think 300 is too many, but there are different markets that are totally different. They are using Linux on cell phones, routers, desktop computers, laptops, servers, etc.
There are not only two versions of Windows. There is Tablet PC edition, Home Media Edition, Windows CE, etc. And, as for versions of just Windows XP, there are many different versions. Many companies create their own standard version that includes the utilities and features they want to include. Granted, they all come from MS, but they are customized. I'm not arguing in favor of Windows, but simple does not work when you need to span many different realms of consumer devices.
nonsense, I don't want the same distro in my cell phone or router as my desktop or server or supercomputing cluster. For AVERAGE computer user, there's about two distros I've seen that they're going to get at the local Best Buy, what's so complicated about that? If they're a little more computer savvy, then they can play with the others.
But like everything in life moderation is key.
Of course RedHat don't mind fragmentation it helps them. By encouraging fragmentation they can sit at the top and say to people "look, we offer stability". That's why Debian does so well (although I have to say I believe stable is a little to stable - 18 month update cycles please :) they offer some stability. It's important to try now ideas out but it's just as important that the OSS community tries to pull together.
While it is great that I can choose from 300 different distributions I have to ask the question: how many of them don't suck? About 5 to 10 would probably be the answer. I just want to cry when I look at the amount of time and effort that has gone into some of these projects that get maybe a hand full of users and then die a slow death as the idologues that started the project realize they aren't going to caputre the market.
It's great that people want to help it's just a shame there are a lot of people that feel the only wheel they can use is the one they built themselves.
I'm sure this post will get moded as a troll in two seconds flat so I am going to stop wasting my time.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
The main thing that might make users "migrate" to Linux-type systems is having it bundled WITH their PC when they first buy it, and with everything they need preinstalled.
Since the big PC sellers eat out of M$'s pocket in the main part, and since each one assumes it's opponents won't do anything first, none of them will change - because unless several of them change at once, none of those who switch will have much success.
Besides, most people who do use *nixes LIKE the many different choices they have available. Each has different drawbacks and benefits - and many of those aren't possible to have together.
Something similar to windows might be what Joe Average wants, but it's often not what those making the linux distros want, and since they are making what they want because it's what they want to do, then they'll keep on as they are.
Insightful? Just plain wrong, I'd say.
How many versions of Windows XP are there? Really just two, Home Edition and Professional Edition. How many versions of Linux 2.6 are there? According to that article, around 300.
You're comparing apples with pears. You should compare Windows with Linux distributions.
And since my posts always seem to get modded as trolls no matter what I say, if you Linux people don't get off your mighty high horse and look at what could get people to migrate from Windows to Linux, it will never happen.
Because you are trolling.
I don't care if it is Ubuntu, or Suze, or Red Hat, or whatever.
So you say, that you know only two - the third is called SuSE - of the mentioned 300 distributions? You just don't have to care about the other 298 distributions, they're made for special purposes. A few of them (Familiar) are made for PDAs, just like Windows CE (yes, another Windows).
Just have one damn version and make the damn thing work for the latest technology, make it fast, and make it easy to understand for even the dumbest american.
What do you mean when you say "latest technology"? There are more cases of Windows not supporting the latest technology.
I don't really think Linux was designed to be an alternative to Windows, and it's not under continued developement for that purpose either. Some distros are intended to make transition from Windows to Linux easier, but it will never be a direct replacement. Would you really want that? I like Linux a lot, but I'd say if average consumer users want an alternative to Windows now, go play with OSX. That's probably the most user-friendly UNIX-like OS you can find right now, out of the box.
It's "PLOAF," not "P-LOAF." Ask about it.
As someone who has tried to help linux make inroads into the places where I've worked or contracted with, I'd like to see it get picked up by more of the general populace. This means that it's going to have to change a bit and become a bit easier to use while not doing away with the security that we've come to know and love.
Think of it this way - fewer worms and zombies clogging up the networks (I may not be infected, but I do feel the bandwidth hit), better security in general, lower operating costs, and any number of other reasons.
However, I think the biggest reason at the moment that I want to see linux get more of a foothold among the general populace is because it's now sort of my job. The thought of being able to affect change and get paid for it appeals to me even though I was doing it before getting paid to do so.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
"He was particularly disdainful of acquiring other distributions for the sake of protecting or expanding market share. "We have zero ambition to do that," he said. 'I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection.'""
Very good point he makes, but it only works with OSS. If he needed to acquire functional IP through business acquisitions, then the Red Hat development plan would begin looking like the MS development plan of the early 90s.
The problem with applying natural selection to Liux distros is that the distros will evolve to fill niches. If mass adoption of Linux to compete with Windows is the goal, then the natural selection model fails... people will choose what works best for them, not what is best for everyone in the long run.
In addition, natural selection does not necessarily lead to what is best for the consumer in general. It sounds nice in theory, but a species on top will do its best to hold down the up-and-comers, thus inhibiting the "natural" part of the selection process.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In RPM land, things are not so clear, as is a bit more rare than an RPM for a distribution works in another, but opening distributions also generate a lot of subdistributions that aggrupates a bit a lot of distros, like all fedora-based ones or the future ones that could be based in opensuse.
I think that is ok that we have a lot of distributions with its own view on how to be installed and somewhat administrated, but could be confusing to have a separate packages for all and each distribution.
I've found yum to be quite good. There are a few GUI extensions that make updating idiot-proof.
Now if I could get a decent driver for my wireless card, I'd probably boot FC4 exclusively.
I think one of the main problems people have is trying to distinguish the differences between what constitutes Windows and what constitutes a Linux Distro. Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu 5.04 cannot be considered to be the same type of thing. Win XP is an operating system, Ubuntu is an operating system plus applications plus utilities plus programming tools plus a kitchen sink.
The closest you can get to compare Windows to Linux is to compare Kernel versions. You could look at it as Win XP Pro/Home==2.4.x/2.6.x tree. Even that is a stretch, but not too far so I'll run with it. The best thing to compare a Distro to is a preinstalled image from a manufacturer. Ubuntu is nice and friendly, comes with all suitable drivers/utilities for wireless networking, Internet surfing and so on, very much like the preinstalled image that Gateway puts on its home PCs. However, RedHat Enterprise Linux has more security features configured, comes with server software installed as standard, very much like the preinstalled image Compaq puts on its mid-range servers.
To that end then there are an unlimited number of preinstalled Windows images dependent on expected usage, the same should (and is, and will be) true for Linux.
I do care if average people start migrating to Linux, because I like what I'm using. The problem is that, considering patents and Treacherous Computing, if Microsoft maintains its marketshare it'll be in a good position to kill Free Software by (indirectly) making it illegal. I say indirectly because they wouldn't make the GPL illegal, but they would mandate Treacherous Computing, which means there would be no way to run anything you compiled yourself (e.g. unsigned code).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I use Gentoo; how does this affect me?
How many versions of Windows XP are there? Really just two...
How many versions of Vista are there going to be? Something like 6. M$ is moving the opposite direction that you are saying Linux should. They are going to create market confusion with their own products, JOY.
Maybe Linux needs to start following the Highlander quote: "There can be only one" and start having all of these competitors duel off
This is always happening. Look at the number of distro's that have totally disappeared. Also remember that of those 300 distros the bulk of the desktop users are probably only using 10 or so of those. (Suse, Madriva, Redhat, FedoraCore, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo, some I am forgetting.) There are a lot of very specialized distros that are used for firewalls and the like. When it comes to desktop use the majority of those 300 sort of fade away.
Just have one damn version and make the damn thing work for the latest technology, make it fast, and make it easy to understand for even the dumbest american.
You never have used Madrake/Mandriva have you? Not to flame, but from the get go they have set out to make a user friendly distro that most any idiot can figure out, and by and large they have done a good job of making the distro good for the power users and good for the lowly idiots of computing. The bulk of your make it work for the latest technology is the fault of your driver makers, not linux. There is poor support for some devices in Linux because of drivers. I mean who had x86-64 support first (Linux or Windows), well Linux did. Seems like they had something working in the latest tech first.
This post has been brought to you by a Dell Inspiron 8600, made less evil by Fedora Core 3.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
"I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection."
Corporate mergers, buyouts, and bancrupties are part of natrual selection. Consumers migrating to one company's offering can lead to 'natural selection'. One company having a big bank roll and buying out weaker competitors is also a form of selection.
In the 1930's there were hundreds of car companies. By the 1980's there were the big three and a few non-US companies. Over those 50 years a lot of 'natural selection' occured, and companies merging was just one option. General Motor's many brands of automobiles are not due to GM's internal innovation, but really are due to GM buying weaker competitors.
Let's watch to see what company will be the GM of Linux distros.
No kidding, I long ago selected against Red Hat.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How many versions of Linux 2.6 are there? According to that article, around 300. It is way, way too complicated for regular people. Well...I must say you are not quite keeping up. Linux 2.6??? That is not distribution...it is a kernel. LINUX IS A KERNEL...Most distros are based on Linux kernel (2.4 series or 2.6 series) and GNU GPLed software. The correct name is GNU/Linux. As far as 300 distros are concerned...I've used about 8 (most of the major ones) and I'm quite content with what I've used and see no need to use specialized distros. With that said, what is wrong with having choices...most average users are going to go with user-friendly distros namely ubuntu, suse, redhat, fedora, mepis, mandriva etc. These distro are complete and work-out-of-the-box. On other note, Linux users/geeks are not sitting on a high horse. If you happen to visit many linux help forums on the net. You would experience that linux forums are the most user friendly.
Code is law.
Never read anything about distros from that famous man
Linux is not a product. It is about choice. And another thing, even if the Linux community did in fact have one voice, I doubt it would be telling people to migrate from their current OS to its own.
RedHat dealt with RPM hell years ago (up2date and yum both work very nicely thank you).
For everything else, there is Autopackage (http://autopackage.org/)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
But that doesn't require consolidation. Consolidation might be one way to achieve that, but it would necessarily decrease the number of players trying other ways that might also be successful.
Making inroads into the home and/or corporate desktop doesn't require a single, monolithic mega-linux distro that answers all questions and solves all problems. It only requires one distro that demonstrates an ease of answering and solving enough of them that it catches on. It might be something like Linspire, for example, or it might not, but if Linspire were subsumed into the One True Linux distro, there would be one less avenue being explored independently.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
No, it might not be decided here (though Linus Torvalds sure made some impact with this thing called Linux). And sure the world might not revolve around Europe's 700+ million people - yet I believe that everyone out there will still be very interested in our purchasing power none the less. So go ahead market your product without European "support"... I like my SuSE installation(s).
Guys, think about this. In genetics, Natural selection does its work but it takes millions of years to reach improvements. What mankind has done (i.e. for breeding dog races, or mixing crops of wheat, etc) is to take the best, mix them, and see which ones work or not.
I think a similar effort should be done regarding linux distros. "Accelerate evolution", so to speak.
I've also noticed that the discrepancies between distros can be classified in the following categories:
* Installer
* Windows manager (GNOME,KDE)
* Configuration tools
* Bundled software
In some distros, i.e. ubuntu hoary, the configuration tools depend on GNOME. If I switch to KDE or other WM, they're no longer available (or maybe they are, but not automatically and transparently).
So, if we make these independent from each other, the distro evolution might get a boost, so we could end up with a "meta-distro" where you can only change some parameters in the installation, and everything will still work as planned.
But then again, i'm no Linux expert, these are just my 2c.
Dude, Linux is about choice. You may like it or not, desktop users may adopt it or not, but Linux is not going to "consolide". This is not a "failure" in linux. It's a "design decision", it can be its biggest strength and its biggest failure, but it's not going to change. Really.
And WRT to "desktop users", they just don't care if there's one, two, or two thousands of windows versions. They just want something that works regardless of what it is.
> You seem to be labouring under the misconception that the
> free software/open source communities see world domination
> or the destruction of Microsoft as an ultimate goal.
Not necessarily, maybe he just thinks that trying NOT to have one single company dominate the market of operating systems is a goal worth pursuing.
Maybe he just feels that de facto standards and interoperability are a good thing for the user no matter what OS one is using, and he thinks that having just a few "standard" distribution would help.
You may be fine with microsoft deciding what runs on every computer and device of almost every single person of the planet, but i for one think of it as unhealty and dangerous for competition, progress and ultimately freedom.
And besides, are you really sure that your freedom to buy a PC and install whatever OS you want can last that long if the number of linux users does not reach a critical mass ??
I would not be so sure, so please think about it again.
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Actually, it requires one, or a few, distros that solve the problems of buisness and normal people, solve them *well* and get enough publicity to be known to the general public.
Having the greatest solution in the world doesn't do you or anyone else any good if it gets lost in the noise of "look at my distro!"
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
And then maybe Linux will have a fighting chance against Windows on the desktop. Face it, Microsoft has "gotten this" from the very beginning. Say what you want about them, but fighting for binary compatibility across all versions of Windows has served Microsoft well. I walk into Best Buy, grab a software title off the shelf and I have high confidence it will install and run on my Windows PC. This, IMHO, is the biggest thing blocking Linux from widespread acceptance on the desktop - binary compatibility - the install application figures out platform dependencies, not the user. OSS is nice, but the vast majority of people don't have the time nor the skill to rebuild everything so that it is compatible with their specific platform.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I want alternatives to Windows, but we need the serious distros to stand up and fight for an "expanded core" that doesn't comprise a constantly shifting codebase. Developers can't effectively write code for Linux because the subsequent support is a nightmare! Even RedHat's code changes too frequently for people to keep up.
I believe RedHat's on the right track, but the rest of the Linux world continues to evolve ... something needs to direct the evolutionary process. Both Apple and Microsoft spend TONS of time on UI, which is the specific direction that Linux needs. Obscure the complexity, unify support for drivers, and support software that people use and you'll find Linux in everyone's home.
I always thought that Linux and the distros is made by people for people, thats really the best explanation for the numbers of distros out there. The goal of linux (if such can exist) is not to replace Windows. Thats why you can never get a free Windows from Linux unless you, yes you, get your thumb out of the dark smelly place and start coding one yourself. Linux is not and will probably never be a drop in replacement for Windows. Even if the community was to mimic every possible bit in the UI all we would have accomplished was a free Windows UI clone for the people that likes how windows works anyway but without 100% binary compability.
There are infact dists that mimics Windows pretty well but they arent that popular. I suspect that once you understand Linux you change dist to something more unixy. Linux isnt hard to use, its only hard if you try to use it as a MS Windows clone wich it aint.
HTTP/1.1 400
If the competition gets too hot, he - or the future owners of the intellectual property - can just renege on Redhat's non-binding, non-perpetual patent "promise" to "refrain from enforcing the infringed patent" [my bold] against FOSS competitors.
Remember when SCO was FOSS's best buddy? Companies change hands, good intentions blow away in the wind, but patents sit there for 14 or 20 years, hissing and spitting venom at all who stray too near.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Before RedHat came along, there was no GCC.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
On reading the term "microdistros", I just realized...linux is like beer! You've got your Budweiser (redhat), Miller (mandrake), Heinekein (suse), a million lesser celebrated brands, and a million microbrews...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
And how will you solve that by dropping RPM and using deb?
The ONE showstopper which makes impossible to make software installable between different distros is the per-distro "package namespace". In redhat X.org is called "xorg-foo", in debian it's called "xserver-xorg". No matter how good your packing system and how good your "dependency solver" is, if every distro names every package differently THINGS ARE NOT GOING TO WORK.
There's no point in redhat adopting deb. Fedora X.org package would not work in debian because fedora's x.org package "provides" xorg not xserver-xorg. Now apply this same logic to all the 15000 libraries in debian.
The one way to solve that compatibility problem is to make programmers to package things instead of distros. If every project would package things and tell distros how the package is named and set the dependencies (builds with libc x.y.z, optional feature depends on libfoobar, etc) AND all distros would use the work provided by the programmers instead of redoing everything, renaming the package etc. The format (deb, rpm) would be irrelevant
Sure, there are 300 different distos out right now. But most of those won't be for the mainstream Joe that is trying out Linux for the first time. There are a few different distros made for that person (Mandriva, Fedora, etc). If/when they are ready for a more powerful distro, then they can switch to their flavor of choice.
But why should we market with the dumbest American in mind? That's what MS does, and look how they've turned out. They are quite popular (to say the least), but at what cost?
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.
Let's see here:
Ubuntu, which is spelled with a "u," not an "a" is pronounced "oo-BOON-too." [source]
SUSE is not "confusing," but it is German. It's typically pronounced "Soo-sah," or "Soo-zah" depending on your dialect, but is often massacred by those who think that proper names are subject to the rules of their own language. Either way, it is most definitely NOT "Sooz" or "Susie." [source]
I have no idea what you are talking about. RPMs allow dependency tracking as well as pre- and post-installation scripting - you can install a new kernel with a single command, for example, or update only the stuff that's already installed on a particular machine.
Are you complaining that managing RPMs is difficult? Perhaps so, but if you've got enough servers (remember Red Hat is targeting the so-called "enterprise" customer, with thousands of servers) it's a hell of a lot easier than managing source.
Completely impossible. For example, the ingredients that make a great rescue distro (like Damn Small Linux -- live distro w/ gui and important apps: 50 mb) are not necessarily the ones that make a great desktop system. Besides, why should there be only one distro when people have different preferences? What is wrong with choice? Sure it might be more difficult to chose between steak, crab, ho-hos, or shrimp, but would you rather your choice be "hotdogs"? Period. Be happy with it cause that's all there is.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
There's really only a few distros that matter.
Ubuntu is hugely popular recently in the home/hobby market. It's the only thing keeping Debian alive.
Redhat/Fedora are big. So is Suse. And then in Asia you have a couple distributions. Most of the other distros are there to filla niche, like Knoppix, Smoothwall, DSL, etc.
Any alternative that makes necessary to search the best to add the condition positively the human being, is welcome.
the problem with saying that natural selection should work is if I wanted to I could tweek a few things make a pretty screen and release butthole distro .000001 tomorrow.. I wouldn't even need a website. Natural selection only works when its actually difficult to sustain yourself
[sarcasm]
Way to go, genius! However, why don't you begin your rants with the state of the vehicular system? There are just way too many types of vehicles in use today! SUVs, coupes, sports cars, dump trucks, vans, motorcycles, the variety just boggles the mind.
Why don't all these vehicle manufacturers just standardize on one make and one model and one configuration so the poor consumer doesn't have to rack his mind deciding whether he should buy that Lexus when a basic Yugo is more than enough to take the groceries home.
Also, have you seen those hippies with their turbo-charged mustangs and those low lifes with their garish, confusing and utterly useless Harley Davidsons? What is the world coming to these days? What's next? Three versions of Windows Vista? How is Joe Schmo supposed to take that in?
[/sarcasm]
That aside, of course, Red Hat would hope that the number of non-Red Hat distros would stay high, since that tends to increase the gap between Red Hat, the only Linux distro that most ITers know about, and the rest of the pack. In addition, the confusion, or perception of confusion, drives corporate Linux users to Red Hat.
Disparaging Novel/SuSE is also to be expected from Red Hat, since SuSE was and is the only competitor to Red Hat.
(My own opinion is that the proliferation of distros is a serious problem that wastes effort by Linux distro developers, complicates support, makes life difficult for application developers, and gives many potential users, both corporate and consumer, the impression that Linux is immature. If whatever-we-mean-by-Linux were a complete system, like FreeBSD, we wouldn't need packaging to be a separate operation, and the number of distro outfits would be very small.)
Several of the responses to this article and every other claim for consolidation revolve around "linux is about choice." I agree, choice is an important mainstay in the linux mindframe. I want to be able to choose how my UI looks, how my mouse behaves, what web browser I use, what permissions I have, etc. But a simple assesment of the current Linux situation is uncomfortably jumbled with too many distributions striving to achieve the same thing but through different means. If just half of the distributions had decided years ago to work on ONE installer, where would we be? If they had decided to work on ONE set of configuration utilities, where would we be? The end user wants choices when it comes to how the system interactively reacts doing every day tasks. But when it comes to system maintenance, software installation, package managements, etc, choice is not productive. When a support team has to know 15 different ways to change the default IP for a wireless network card based on the plethora of distributions, that is not productive. When a package has to be compiled and released in 4 package formats with 10 different sets of libraries to support the majority of linux distributions, that is not productive. I love choice, I love that there are 10+ GUI's for me to switch between. I lvoe that I don't have to pay another company to change my theme in those window managers. But I also love that fact that there is really only one X-windows. But what I don't love is that a dos to unix conversion utility is called "dos2unix" on redhat/suse/mandrake and "flip" on ubuntu. There are several more examples and I'll leave is as an exercise to the commenters to flame me for my criticisms and critiques of the state of GNU/Linux. To summarize, choice is wonderful, but so many of the problems and complaints that linux users have could have been effectively solved by now if the 200+ developers working on 40+ projects decided to work together instead of trying to invent forty versions of the wheel.
.. some of these 'distros' are not that different. IE: distrob B & C are based on distro A so they are actually just a repackaging of existing distro to make it easier and more friendly, like kbuntu and ubuntu are to debian. Yes there are differences, but they share code and packages.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
From my experience Redhat is just becoming another microsoft but with Open source behind it. Really SuSe is a competitor to Redhat, In fact we have been a 100% redhat shop on all 5000+ servers that we run using linux. Until this year when we started to use SuSe, We have now used suse as our primary OS. When any new systems come online its with SuSe, the support is generally better.. I suspect only better things are to come from Novel.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
I wonder about Suse too though. They've generated much buzz lately, I think they've set themselves up to be *the* legitimate alternative to Red Hat, but they aren't generating RH-level revenue. (yet?)
Perpetual #2 is a very tough spot though and:
1. opens the door to MS adopting redhat and sucking all the money out of linux.
2. keeping Novell and any other commercial Linux distros as MS competitors in name only. Which would be the point for Microsoft.
At the PHB/consumer market level where RedHat/Suse/Lindows/MS are trying to compete, no one is going to be sensitive to the underlying differences between distros. Once you get used to the desktop, they work the same. Yast is good, but it's hard to say, "Our system tools are the best!" to most PHB/Consumers who DON'T want to look at system tools, ever. So it comes down to, "is the price/feature combination right?" and "I do/do not trust this company."
Sadly, it's inevitable that there be one or two major distros. At some point, commercial resources kick in and overwhelm the smaller distros in terms of features/functionality. Even if you make a 1:1 copy, (CentOS) wealthier paying corporate consumers clearly prefer one over the other.
So at some point, there should be a clear first tier Linux 1 or 2 companies garnering most platform market share, I'm sure this sounds crazy, but I think MS will try to grab as much of the Linux money they can. Then a bunch of other small Linux distro related companies. Ideally there will still be numerous OSS distros and applications with lots of volunteers doing innovative work.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
There are is XP Home, XP Pro, XP Media Centre, Windows XP Tablet plus the server side Windows Server 2003, that is one distro with various licensing rules. Oh, there is also XP third-world, that only runs on a PIII or lower, and wont even host in VMWare on a modern box because the CPUID opcode still returns the real CPU. When you domain XP Pro it changes a lot of behaviour; you need to test in both modes. Remember also that WinXP is a pretty bare bones system: no word processor, no DVD player or burning 'cept maybe in the media centre release...there is little variation between the distroes because there is not much in any of them.
In Longhorn we will seen many more versions, with a split between corporate ones (takes the corporate keys) and consumer ones, and a wider spread of functionality. yes, this will make testing that much harder for those people that still do windows software.
I agree. Try reading this article, it might help. It uses a motorcycle/car metaphor to explain why Linux will never need to replace Windows.
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.
yeah, there is nothing to scare you more than a bugrep against some random distro, "debian unstable", which can be pretty broken sometimes (like touch() not working) or a fedora release.
The costs of replicating the environment mean that you probably cannot do it for more than a few distros, which leaves the end users to fend for themselves. Bad news for RedHat: SuSE is enough of a mainstream distro to merit the effort.
One mistake of redhat is that by giving "amateurs" nothing but fedora is that it has pushed away those amateurs who do write the apps RH needs, onto other distros like Suse or Ubuntu. The platform you develop on is always the best supported. A commercial vendor (like vmware) can afford copies of RHEL to test their product, but an OSS dev team? Unlikely. RedHat's pricing model has made redhat linux too expensive for OSS dev teams to keep around just for testing, unless they really care about the platform.
It's not just the programmers: Debian has a very strange way of naming source tarballs with "_" in the names that doesn't actually reflect the content of the tarball. SuSE stuffs the Wacom kernel modules and configurarion tools in the xorg packages, for no good reason whatsoever. RedHat's actually been pretty good about naming packages what the author wanted it to be called, but when you look at the lack of conventions in the Perl crowd for the naming of source packages compared to the modules that are actually in the package, you find an endless source of confusion and conflicts.
.spec file and RPM structure, but then you have SuSE go and commit absolute absurdities in it, like adding tarballs of patches instead of the individual patch files and selecting which patches to apply in a script in the source files, rather than in the .SPEC file itself, and you have absurdity piled on absurdity.
/usr/sbin or /etc like the rest of us.
The Linux kernel authors are doing a good job of creating what you describe, a basic
Unfortunately, I've worked with open source authors on other projects who absolutely refused to accomodate the most basic public standards, such as Dan Bernstein's refusing to include the documentation for qmail or his other tools in any easily mirrored or downloaded way but only maintained intermingled with other tools on his website, and insisting on his *OWN* hard-coded top-level directories for things instead of using
Um, yes yum works, but I would never agree with someone saying it works well.
It is very slow and hogs memory like only beta versions of mozilla. It sets its pace at the time it takes to check to see if any of the repositories have changed, even if it checked 30 seconds ago.
A "yum search" not only hits the network, but it takes over 50MB of ram to do that.
Yum is only tolerable when called from cron IMO.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
...that if there were fewer distributions which development energy were focused on that greater strides could be made in the technology. While I think that the number of distributions currently "in the wild" isn't completely ridiculous, it seems to be heading rapidly in that direction. If we could, for instance, gather all of developers of the "networking utility distributions" together and let them focus all of their efforts on one single "product", we would have the best features from the best distributions. Then again, choice is good.
What part of my post exactly made it sound as if I was sympathetic to Microsoft? I dislike their crummy products and terrible business practices as much as the next guy. They have crushed innovation and set us back by years.
I was just pointing out that the free software community is a label applied to a very large group of people pulling in different directions and not everyone is bent on destroying Microsoft at any cost and forming the "one true distro" - who is anyone to say what millions of developers should be doing with their spare time?
I personally write free software because I enjoy it, I like the free exchange of ideas and software with other developers and I like being able to explore other ideas and ways of doing things. I also very much appreciate being able to have a completely free and constantly evolving desktop.
The fact that people have responded to my post spitting and sneering just goes to prove my point. If you'd bother to follow the link to my website or look at my posting history you'd see that I pretty much share your point of view.
Stupid that you got troll for that. I smiled :)
As any Gentoo forums user will tell you, Gentoo is a metadistribution. It's up to you to emerge whatever distro you want.
ah, sometimes the jokes work, sometimes they don't. Wasn't intended to be a troll. Oh well!
or a cartel of game companies could collaborate on one linux distro, decide that was the "one true OS" they would develop for in the troika of MS, Mac and 'other' ", and do all their games on that platform. Or say office (OO.org) could decide to release an integrated OS with their product and perhaps a few more critical business apps.
Besides that, yep, even the big hardware vendors are sorta screwed, as releasing "linux" just means WAY too many different things, so mostly except for professionally administered servers they go "this just ain't happening" for a "the masses" guy machine with linux pre installed, and I can see their point on that. Nothing to pick with an assurance that you as the vendor haven't picked "wrong". It's too big a gamble. There are a few exceptions now obviously, but still..the bulk of the market for the alternative desktop/OS will continue to be marginalized from mass divergence, "me too"ism with marginal distro du juor, and lack of agreed upon standards.
HOWEVER...yes, if there was at least a mainstream accepted way to package a kernel of choice with a package of apps of choice, so that it didn't matter what distro you were using, then perhaps it could go forward faster.
I think either consolidate, OR make it excrutiatingly easy for "the masses" guy to build his own on demand, and linux become known as the "have it your way, because that's the only way" operating system. That would mean dumping all the current distros and just concentrating on kernel and packages and put the convergence efforts on standardizing the way packages and apps are pushed, perhaps source based only, get rid of debs/RPMS and assorted whatnot completely.
In the future we might see Timelix "the best linux distro for your watch."
Think Deeply.
That is a great article - I really enjoyed that. Thanks for the heads up, I'll be pointing others at that ;-)
Hmmn, this really comes over as a senior suit dissing the competition and engaging in a little preening. Lunch with Shadowman would surely have been more entertaining though it would probably be a couple of days before the hangover subsided.
Novell/SUSE have an increasingly strong product and it's very, very far from "theater". And besides, the ultimo, leading Linux distro may not even have been launched yet. A major corporation could enter the Linux world tomorrow with a brand-new distro and turn the entire place upside down.
I guess Red Hat had better keep running because there could be some really hungry bears after them.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
...even get my alleged "linux friendly" HP USB connected printer to work. Fries my grits, because I got it to work before I "upgraded" my distro. It doesn't even register as a USB device, it's like nothing is plugged in. It *sucked* before getting it to work, but I accomplished it eventually (a cli guru I am not), but now--sheesh, if it can't be seen it just ain't happenin'.
Back in ye olden days,(I started with RH 7 series) my parallel connected printers I always were able to get working, now with USB I get nada. My cheap USB camera doesn't show up either. Forced to keep an old win98 install on another computer just to pull my pics off. Oh ya, some USRobotics router I got is invisible as well, desktop paperweight. Looks cool....no network for ME
sorta sucks, it's like it gets so darn *close*, but there's always one or two critical bugs that make it uncool.
Can't afford OSX at this time (not interested in the mini at all), but was thinking of trying open solaris and also some of the BSDs to see if I can get all my do-dads functional. Just tired of trying different distros all the time seeking the magic solution. And the deal is, there is so much reinventing the wheel going on in linux land, one has to wonder how much better it would be if there was a solid coordinated effort to make ONE really good desktop OS instead of hundreds of "me toos"
We all know Red Hat created gcc, Linux and the GPL.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They needed a distro on which to build their OES/NLD products,
Did they? Why? What makes Novell apps different to other proprietary apps that run on a variety of different Linux distros? Frankly I don't think Novell's making most of its money from supporting Suse. Why don't they just sell NTerprise, which runs on a variety of Linux distros, most of which people are already quite happy with, rather than trying to make folks in the US or APAC use Suse (which is quite rar to do in such areas)? Why does everyone who makes apps on Linux apparently need a distro? Veritas doesn't, Symantec doesn't, IBM doesn't.
Thanks to some sort of bizarre copyright dispute over the mp3 music format, theatre is one thing RHEL DOESN't have.
That's not my point at all - the point is that whatever we buy will have to suit our needs/tastes or else. In that manner it will be decided here. The market always decides.
there should be no cosolidation. I like choice and it is the natural check and balance system of open source.
Whether who is the best or most popular or who bought who is irrelevant. Companies just need to choose one as their standard and stick with it. Companies everyday choose one window application to do a task as a standard when there could be tons of choices.
choice good - consolidation bad.
I think they spelled his name wrong. Isn't it Szulinux?
Hey! He's his own distro