Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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
Netscape directory services have been open source for a while now.
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Main_Page
If you want desktop support software the company to look at is Novell, not realy Redhat. Redhat is good at what they do, Novell is good at desktop infrastructure.
For isntance take the NDS model, they made it possible to do the whole desktop enterprise thing with Windows, and Microsoft made their inferior copy of it called Active Directory. Novell was the pioneers and they still can be.
Novell is working on evolution, hula and a veriaty of other products (glitz and cairo for gnome for instance). Email, calendering, contact for the average person, for the average company.
Kerberos and LDAP works in Linux. I do it, and I am a fairly stupid person. It's a pain in the ass compared to Active directory, but that parts that matter can be done now. Hopefully somebody will make tools to make it easier.
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.
The reason that I personally will do my best to avoid redhate at all costs in the future is that they played bait and switch with us, the users. They provided us with a stable distribution which many of us actually gave them money for, and then they changed their terms entirely by making you pay for the stable version, and only giving you an alpha/beta version. I will not play these games with a person, or a retail outlet, or a software publisher.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Early versions of Dia did suck. It has gotten a lot better. I do like kivio more. But agree that OO.o Draw makes a good, basic vector graphics program (and Inkscape more so).
Just a few weeks ago, I had to write a proposal for management types. Network diagrams and the like. Though I've used DIA, I knew it wouldn't be up for the challenge. After some sweating over having to wine visio, I did some serious googling and came up with:
http://www.thekompany.com/projects/kivio/
All I have to say is: Holy Crap. I almost knew everything about this from my visio experience (Not a lot, but I could get aroind). A lot of the symbols were the same, and it did had all the little nice things visio had. If you have ubuntu or another distro with a good package manager, I'd heartily recommend trying this program.
Fedora is very stable. Not to mention Fedora has one of the most active mailing list and user-base community of other distros. Redhat has to make money- they are charging for service and support if you need that. Boo-hoo. Waahhh. Suse is following in Redhat's shoes, as it seems to work as a good business model for a Linux company.
Who said it was a "scientific article?" Take up concerns over phrasing with Drexel Assoc. Prof. B. D. McCullough. But please point out places where he defended Gnumeric's mistakes. In most cases, he noted Gnumeric fixed an error & MS Excel didn't. This isn't saying the Gnumeric errors were good. But that it is good they were fixed.
Indeed, he criticizes Gnumeric: "On this basis alone, the RNG (random number generator) in Gnumeric can be judged as unacceptable for statistical purposes."
Exchange keeps rising in market share because its: (just to name a few) 1. A solid product that is easy to manage. 2. Lot of different software solutions integrate with it. 3. Its one of Microsofts main server platform.. therefore it gets alot of attention and money. 4. Outlook is a solid easy to use email client, that has been around for years. 5. Works nicely with Windows Mobile 6. Part of Small Business server... This helps small businesses to get a Enterprise class email server. Just at the feature enhancements since Exchange 5.5 to 2003... There is no reason why it should have grown in market share.
Evolution has an Exchange feature (have to pay for it though), also if his company has Exchange 2003 OWA works nicely, not has good as Internet Explore, but I use it when needed.
Check out Knowledge Tree. They have a fairly polished webdav-based DMS, and are going to write a MS plugin for it as well (Plugin not open source). It has LDAP integration, and versioning. I plan to install it and goof around once I get my website back up and running, and get a couple of spare computers to hook everything up on.
Hopefully, I'm looking to get a Hula, Knowledge Tree, Fedora Directory, (I hate OpenLDAP, and I don't want to pay for Novell's) server, with pGina for Windows client authentication. I haven't tried OpenOffice with a WebDav server backend, but if that worked with revisioning, you have all the parts for a completely open-source server/infrastructure that meets the requirements that I mentioned. I just don't know if I'm going to have time to ever put it together, and some projects aren't mature enough to completely replace their MS counterparts. Hula especially, as right now it has only limited client support for all the applications, but it supports LDAP, and it's not a bunch of recycled parts with no management parts like Kolab. They should rename that project Kobble. But hopefully soon, all the parts will be production ready.
Man do I go off topic.
Exchange keeps rising in market share because its: (just to name a few) 1. A solid product that is easy to manage. 2. Lot of different software solutions integrate with it. 3. Its one of Microsofts main server platform.. therefore it gets alot of attention and money. 4. Outlook is a solid easy to use email client, that has been around for years. 5. Works nicely with Windows Mobile 6. Part of Small Business server... This helps small businesses to get a Enterprise class email server. Just at the feature enhancements since Exchange 5.5 to 2003... There is no reason why it should have grown in market share.
Can I have a few pints of whatever you're drinking? 1. Exchange is in NO WAY stable - mean time to crash is measured in minutes rather than hours. 2. Possibly true, but ALL the applications are as abysmal as Exchange. 3. That it's MS's "main server paltform" should be a source of real shame for the company. 4. Outlook (all versions) is just a total disaster - it's unstable, full of security holes and actually makes an already poor "operating system" almost unusable. 5. Who wants "Windows Mobile"? - there are NO Windows Mobile devices that actually work properly! 6. Anyone who tries to use Small Business Server is wasting their time. It simply doesn't work: it's unstable and insecure. Anyone trusting their business data to it really doesn't see any real future in their business.
You mean, like Novell is doing with this:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxsmallbiz/
I would also like to note that in the country I live(Norway) I see that Microsoft Small Buisness Server with 5 clients costs above 6000,- Norwegian kroner(It would actually be about $1000), whereas as far as I can see, Novell Small Buisness Server costs... $475, and I do believe that includes eDirectory, 100 clients, etc. That's _HALF_ the price of Microsoft SBS, and eDirectory is a dream come true.
Of course anyone wanting to change platform should do some real testing before deploying it in a production environment, but that's why there's Fedora Core and OpenSUSE.
-- Linux user #369862
I have yet to see a *single* PowerPoint presentation that I would in any way consider useful, informative, or basically anything other than a complete waste of time.
I'm often wary of those who talk about their worlds in such stark, absolute terms.
you (SIC) can't readily make drastic changes to a PowerPoint presentation on-the-fly
You mis-spelled "I". As in "I can't readily make drastic changes to..."
One can. One just has to know the tool. And the tool is dead simple. And the changes make for a good artifact, unlike the white board, which in virtually all environments has to be meticulously recorded onto paper, by hand. Now that's SLOW!
The white board does have it's place. It's as much about context, as anything else. One
C//