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Red Hat CEO Decries Open Source Pretenders
OSTalent writes "The Register has an article about Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik's recent remarks...'For all his enthusiasm about the community and sever-side Linux, Szulik provided something of a reality check on the much debated theme of a Linux desktop. According to Szulik, the huge presence of legacy infrastructure like Microsoft's Exchange and PowerPoint has prevented a lot of people making the move.'" From the article: "It's very difficult to shape the development agenda of the community... every day people comment to us on the quality of our products through Kerrnel.org. What's important is staying true to the premise of the GPL model ... It starts with the APIs now, then it moves into content. Try to put [Microsoft's] Windows Media Player into Firefox and see what it looks like. In a world where application-to-application interaction becomes the norm, where does that innovation come from and who owns it?"
I don't know what I'd do without all those time wasting presentations.
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
"The desktop has become a lot like teenage sex: a lot of people are talking about it but not many people are doing it," Szulik said.
/.!
Well, it's the reverse here on
Powerpoint isn't the show-stopper. I've given presentations using OpenOffice and although the fonts can be a bit interesting when you change computers, it works.
Nah - the killers for me at least are Excel, Visio and Project. The OpenOffice version of the first doesn't scale near to where I need it, and porting macros is way too much effort, and the second two still don't have any real equivalents in the Linux space.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I've struggled with this for a long time. Firefox has the wonderful ability to be put on a disc as a kiosk which is fantastic for setting a known baseline for presentations exported from PowerPoint. It would be a wonderful way to avoid all the security/configuration issues you run into with distributed presentations in the real world, especially if something more capable than MPEG1 can be used such as Flash.
n tHTMLTest.zip
However, Windows Media and M$ Office embedded media use a lot of M$-specific stuff to make it work properly. It's not just windows media that is a problem, it's also scaling graphics.
Here is a sample with IE and Firefox screenshots showing both image scaling problems and embedded media problems. This is from a few months ago but the problems persist with Firefox.
http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/PowerPoi
Kerrnel.org
Talk Like A Pirate Day was last month.
"The desktop has become a lot like teenage sex: a lot of people are talking about it but not many people are doing it," Szulik said.
(insert obligatory "average slashdotter" joke here)
My other account has mod points.
We've already /.'ed Kerrnel.org?
I think a mirror is at http://kernel.org./
Hurry up and release the Netscape-LDAP 100% free and unencumbered.
/phew.
Pick an open project for calendaring/mail and make Outlook work with it.
Create better tools for identity management.
The problem with people not embracing open source is not with open source, its that nobody knows what they're looking for with open source. Focus on what small business needs, and what open source can offer. Create small, turn-key packages. Create an LDAP authentication server. Create an LDAP mail server that operates as a drop-in replacement that works with the identity server. Create a Document Management System that works with OpenOffice, so that you have it part of the file-save dialog. Give business the tools it needs to work, and work efficiently!
The tools are better. Everyone keeps saying that they are. The design is sound, the pieces are there, but nobody has stepped up to the plate and sewn it all together. Stop the development of new tools. Take the tools that we have already and put them together. Industry needs more than Google and a Howto posted on an undergrads website.
Everybody knows that there are a million ways to authenticate a bunch of workstations to one or more server. LDAP, LDAP and Kerberos. GSSAPI, Radius, whatever, but for the love of all things sane and holy, pick one! Pick one, and build the turnkey solution to do it.
Hard as it is to admit if you love OSS, if you really are a "knowledge worker", its worth paying the MS tax for access to things like Excel and Visio. And if you exchange files with customers, you have even less choice.
IMHO, the way to dislodge Microsoft is not by positioning linux desktop as a viable alternative for hardcore knowledge warriors. Instead its to go after the next tier down. The average pleb sitting at his computer in the bowels of a Bank does not use Visio, or really even MS Word, on a constant basis.
Those people could get by fine on a good desktop distro, as long as they had Citrix-style access to the serious Windows-based applications running on a server. They might only need them twice a day, but when they need them, they do need them. One MS license could probably serve 5 people if it was pooled like this...
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
more like tubgirl; shit splattering everywhere.
I completely agree.
Without PowerPoint, people would probably be forced to actually have a well-thought out topic, which would be very unproductive, seeing how much time it would cost them to think about it. With PowerPoint, even the most exotic topics can be handled with some was-files and 5 funny cliparts per slide.
A good investment, I think.
P.S.: I have never thrown a chair in my live. I also have never actually fucking killed anybody.
I just hate it when those legacy products like Exchange keep rising in market share (from the current ~60% to a projected ~80% in 5 years) and adding features not available in competitor products (e.g. OMA, OWA).
Linux Desktop may make huge inroads when CPUs that support "Pacifica" and "Vanderpol" virtualization technology go mainstream. The choice won't be "Windows vs. Linux" anymore; it can be both. And you can bet companies will quickly be asking their employees to do all the INTERNET related activity on the Linux "side". Heck, they could probably sandbox the Windows half very heavily, if all its going to do is run Office.
Mark my words: the biggest threat to Microsoft is having the "either-or" argument disappear. (And I acknowledge that VMWare and others can do this today, but they 1) aren't free, 2) are already growing in use.)
>where does that innovation come from and who owns it?
The workers!
I meant "then."
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation.
Funny. This from a company which releases software like GFS, but then seems to almost actively dissuade other distributions from using it.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with other examples right at the moment, but it seems like I've run across several "open-sourced" stuff from Redhat which had virtually zero documentation- not even so much as what they actually DO, how to set them up, etc.
So I'm going to flip it back at RedHat's CEO- buddy:
Sorry, folks. I'm just plumb unimpressed with RedHat. They seem very much for taking from the GPL/OSS community, but even more for protecting the hell out of their revenue stream to the absolute line the GPL allows them to. Hell, I can't even get a non-commercial license for RedHat's commercial distribution to learn it, and has anyone SEEN how much the damn certification costs!?
Please help metamoderate.
Can someone please tell me what the big deal is with Visio? On the commercial win32 front, SmartDraw seems just as capable & usually cheaper. On the F/OSS front, Kivio and dia rock.
According to Szulik, the huge presence of legaet PGP capabilities that infrastructure like Microsoft's Exchange
RH should try Evolution and get off the pot. You even get PGP that Microsft does not have.
Suse it better than RH from what I can tell, it even recognized my 54g D-Link G650 card and works great.
Linux is ready for the desktop, and many new countries to desktop computing are NOT using the North American status quo of Microsoft. The biggest reason Microsoft has a market share at all in China is because pirated copies are FREE. If not for that fact, the upcoming worlds biggest market would be Linux. Even Dell and HP sell Linux desktops and portable in China that we cannot get in North America.
The OS market is heating up and Novell seems to be making ground on Red Hat. And they are feeling the heat.
Anyhow, Szulik tends to hang around many of the more larger conservative kids, I mean companies, and even then in the backrooms a lot of it is going on that the CEOs and CIOs would like to admit ( I'm talking about messing around with Linux desktops, geez you guys have dirty minds ).
If Szulik were to hang around with more of the leaner mid sized less well off young companies he would find a lot more physical experimenting going on, especially with thin client Linux ( what else would they be doing ).
And as for local, state and federal governmental bodies around the world, they are begging for it, which at least is better than them always doing it to the tax payers.
That's easy:
Where does it come from? Apple.
Who owns it? Microsoft.
For those interested in Excel errors, here are other sources:
Hmm... tastes a bit nutty!
Exchange is even keeping my dad from using firefox on his company laptop let alone Linux. (Yes it works in firefox, but half-assed)
Mixing free and closed software is like mixing oil and water. For example, you can copy share, do business with, and distribute Linux all you want. Stick a proprietary piece of software or media on the same CD, and now you are dead in the water.
Free markets are about freedom. When people have it, they tend to use it to create wealth and prosperity where none ever existed before. Closed software is not about freedom, copy it and you can be sued or go to jail. Some people call that an "intellecutal property" right, but just because someone calls something a property right doesn't mean that it is.
True property rights don't derive from incentive, they derive from just allocation of things that have limited supply and demand. Just property rights lead to strong incentives, but coerced incentives do not lead to just property rights.
Describing Microsoft products as "legacy." I like that. They could be better, but MS, the company that trumpets their innovation, really just sits on their intellectual asses and collects money on a shrewd business deal of twenty plus years ago. But threaten that money stream and, whoa, watch them innovate.
Sorry, but I have no enthusiasm for sever-side anything. Cuts too close to home.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Who wants to relearn something when they don't want to. Toolmakers make the mistake of building great new tools and expect everyone to see the merits of them. But tool users just need to get work done. They care not one whit about the geegaws that go into them, so long as they don't have to learn too much, RTFM, and use their old data that took them years to make.
It doesn't matter if it's a holy GnuWidget. People don't know (F)OSS from dog poop. They know Microsoft because that's what came on their machine. There are people that swear by Microsoft Works, perhaps the most awful 'office suite' ever written, because they finally figured out how to make it work. There's a lesson in that for the community.
FOSS has no marketing department, and will always battle those with budgets that can spread the word, or make it part of a bundle on a newbie's PC. Fight that, and you'll win, if winning is important.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Outlook is a big security hole masquerading as an email client. It just sucks. Ya and I mean Office outlook - don't even talk to me about outlook express.
IMHO, qemu (on Linux, with kqemu accelleration) works quite well with Win2k, and is free.
(Ok, qemu is Free, kqemu if free as in beer) XP is slow, last I checked anyway.
(Win98 flies...)
I haven't seen a glitch on Win2K running anything I have tried yet, and on reasonable hardware (Athlon 2100+/512M Ram) the emulation is faster than my box at work for anything. (Celeron 1.7)
Full didscosure---To me, Windows is a toy OS... I have it, it runs, as do all my old apps.
I don't really use it much to be able to say "it's bulletproof".
"GW Bush: proof that you can fool all the people all of the time."
I propose an edit:
GW Bush: proof that you can fool 51% of the people all of the time.
Yep the title says it all....
With a last name like that, I find it hard to believe someone takes this guy seriously!
(If you feel confused, Look up wat Szulik means in Russian (?????).)
rely on closed source management tools like Yast
Yast has been GPL for a while now. Here's a news.com.com.com.com.bork.bork.bork article from March 2004 about it.
Not true, you forgot AutoCAD.
To date, there is no CAD software for Linux that even half resembles the capability of ACAD. The best thing I've found is Cycus, but it is nowhere close. I wish everybody would stop fiddling with icon suites and desktop skins and get to work on a real GPL CAD application.
The entire design, building, and construction industry is hinged on AutoCAD. Oh sure, there are plenty of so-called competitors, but when #2 (Microstation) decides to flip its entire file format to AutoCAD's proprietary format that's a pretty good indication of who owns the market.
The pathetic thing is that AutoCAD is a house of cards. It is a mishmash of Lisp, VBA, C, C++, DCL, VB, dotNet, and is wildly unstable. The features are always changing and every release crushes all previous version file formats. It is the biggest assembly of bolt-on code for such a huge pile of money you can imagine.
But AutoCAD still rules, nobody in GPL-land is really paying attention.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
No, and you should almost be modded down again!
A spreadsheet isn't a statistical tool. You're misusing it and saying it sucks. For statistics use something like SPSS or such, not excel. It might be OK for small stuff, but I've never seen anyone even use it for that. Next thing you know, someone will be complaining about the 65 thousand row limit, and how he can't manage his data with it, just because he's never heard of databases...
What you're complaining about is like a carpenter saying his hammer isn't very good at dealing with screws.
"The desktop has become a lot like teenage sex: a lot of people are talking about it but not many people are doing it," Szulik said.
o.0
he sounds disappointed.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I use GNU R for my heavy lefting. If Excel isn't meant to do statistics right, then maybe it shouldn't have statistical functions! That Gnumeric and others can get much of this right is a sign that spreadsheets can be decent at this--maybe not as good as SPSS/Stata/SAS/R/S+, but still better than Excel.
If people complain about OO.o Calc or Gnumeric not importing their Excel spreadsheets (as OP had done), they are almost certainly using Excel beyond the basics.
I'm not complaining that my hammer can't handle screws. I'm complaining that MS sells toolboxes that claim to be able to deal with screws, but that none of the tools that appear to be screwdrivers actually work. Only it is worse than that: if I had screws, I'd know they had failed--I would see they were stripped. When Excel @#%@#$s up, you haven't a clue.
I sat down with the Directory of IT Security for Kaiser Permanente, a major HMO here in California. He liked the Linux desktop concept I put in front of him, but then stated that they have over 2000 home grown Windows applications that they built in-house upon which they are dependent to run their business. Other people have told me about how they can much more easily develop useful applications with Visual Basic than you can with Gtk and other standard 'IX tools.
We may sit here and go on about the shortcomings of Windows and Visual Basic, but in the world where you're actually trying to sell product, the perception of your market is also their Reality. Is there another tool, similar in ease of use to Visual Basic, that is available for people to quickly and easily create applications on Linux?
For some time I've believed that the first place that desktop Linux would get into would be those shops where the users are production workers who spend their day doing repetitive tasks such as data entry, medical transcriptions, or work at call centers. As I've been researching call center operations, I've come to find that dialing and "Computer Telephony Integration" software are the mission critical applications. Of course they're all written for Windows. So how does Linux break into that market?
What keeps kicking around in my brain is that the early adopters of Linux on the desktop are governments - China, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Israel. All are moving to Linux.
When I talk to college IT directors, the idea of using Linux desktops gets met with that "deer in the headlights" look when they anticipate the mass revolt they'd experience from the faculty and student body.
The $64 billion question is, who's going to use desktop Linux and how are they going to use it? If y'all could suggest some industries and/or markets you feel that Linux could easily be adopted into, I'd love to hear it, because if it's really there, I'm gonna go get it!
I am used to linux since so many years. But the more it goes, the more i get tired of it. Why ? Because each time, i buy something new. Each time... I've got real big issues to make it to work. It reaches me to the point, i feel bad, when i find something cheap, remember those windmodems nightmare. Scanmaster which doesn't work anymore. My last notebook with centrino, wifi hangs from time to time.
Well, it helps me to understand why usually companies which offers linux as preinstalled system, espect to be paid for preinstallation.
Everytime i look for some new stuff, especially cheap stuff, i am really frighten, it would take weeks, sometimes month before it could work.
What i could understand 5 years ago, as linux was growing, now start to bother me so much, i have a windows partition, to see if everything is working and how is it working with windows, before linux installation.
I personaly think, this kind of issues, will always stop common users to join the linux community. I have worked in the IT sector, and i am 100% sure, But common users will never be able to join the linux community, if this issue is not solved. Also what disapoints me, is that it hasn't been solved since the start of linux, which was in the 90's. So will it ever be solved ? and linux to stay a free developper product for developpers ?
http://www.taskjuggler.org/
I was pointed to this program some days ago. I don't know if it's good or bad, but some serious people have told me it's good and a serious competitor for MS Project in some aspects. At least it's free and you can test it to see if it fits your needs.
Wine should eventually be able to take care of older Win32 stuff. New stuff should just be written cross-platform. For apps and situations that Wine can't handle -- well, you probably have a lot of Windows lisences, so just don't upgrade, and run those legacy Windows apps under Xen 3.0.
But I believe Wine will become an integral part of the Linux desktop, once it hits version 1.0. It'll possibly make a bigger impact than Firefox did.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
There are MS Exchange replacements that even MS Outlook users can use without even realizing they're not on "Exchange". The MS desktop monopoly can work against Microsoft when their servers don't compete well with others, and a single compatible server can then reach 90% of desktops. Once the MS Office formats no longer lock desktops to each other, because other apps can process them, the MS legacy can rapidly fade, except where it really is superior. Exactly where that is remains to be seen.
--
make install -not war
OpenOffice Draw is about where Visio was when Microsoft bought it. It's good enough for drawings with boxes, circles, and arrows.
Very good comment on Slashdot " What about AutoCAD " I often think that Microsoft / ESRI / Autodesk send up these smokescreens about issues like PowerPoint so that the real issues are totally forgotten. Bluntly the best show and tell PowerPoint killer program I have found is a little one from Russia called Able Slide Show http://www.rastervect.com/index.htm#ad Its limited as far as PowerPoint but it sure keeps the execs awake. All the majors joined the IAI - http://www.iai-na.org/ International Alliance For Interoperability - and all are trying to subvert the initiative in favor of their own standards making interoperability obsolete. ESRI owns GIS and The Ground, Autodesk Owns the buildings above the ground , Pro-e and Microsoft own everything else and each one is determined to own the whole enchilada. We are working on several projects at the moment centered around Business Information Systems in engineering and construction and recently ran across this comment which about says it all " Yup dxf format really means what is says "data-document exchange format means from Autodesk to Autodesk and nothing else ". In the future the electronic parametric design programs need to talk to the real world building in real time and 80% of the research at present is on file conversion ( Which means something is lost ) and no one is getting any help from the major stakeholders. Our real hope in all this mess is bluntly GOGGLE and we should all support them ( : ( : peter Ideas Business Technology Integration http://www.ideapete.com/ 505.890.9649 707.237.5225 " Breaking NEW ground by taking existing concepts and putting them together in a NEW way "
ideapete
The show stopper for me is, oh, nothing.
IT profressional, all day, every day, Windows not required.
The only time I have to deal with ppt is when someone sends me some joke email thats a jpg in a word document embedded in a ppt. My bit bucket is full of 'em
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
From my skimming the website you linked to, it appears that VariCAD is proprietary software. I believe the grandparent and previous posters are referring to free software programs to do CAD work. Hence, I don't think VariCAD will fill the bill.
Digital Citizen
Actually, Pro/Engineer and Solidworks are available for linux. 80% of Solidworks users upgraded from AutoCAD at one time.
Personally, I'd like to see the 16th Amendment repealed.