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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?"
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
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.
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.
In my workplace we are finding out that Visio doesn't scale well enough. We have ~100MB of source code branched into say 10 different variants, with comparable amounts of documentation in visio and word.
CVS takes care of configuration management in the code but in the doc we have to have multiple copies of everything and merges are totally manual.
We are just unable to maintain so much documentation. I am working on a project to port the docs to xml and svg, and commit them to cvs.
There are many free svg programs out there which will do everything we are doing with visio.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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