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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.
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
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.)
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...
Redhat. Lets think about this.
Oh yah. They do large amounts of development work and stabilization for the 2.4 and 2.6 series kernel.
Hrm. I don't seem to be remembing anything abotu rewriting stack smashing protection and getting it actually incorporated into the GCC 4.x series.
Oh, and making SELinux usable. Na. That couldn't be Redhat. Could it?
Getting OO.org 2 ported to work with the gcj compiler instead of requiring a java runtime for many of it's features. THat couldn't be Redhat, eh?
Or how about GCC? Redhat couldn't be putting developers and resources into that project either, right?
And open sourcing GFS.. or netscape directory services, or developing and improving the ext3 file system.
Or how about Cygwin? I bet Gentoo did a lot of work on that one. Didn't they? That couldn't be Redhat could it?
I guess that doesn't amount to jack shit compared to your massive contributions to F/OSS software.
This couldn't be the company that allows projects like CentOS and Whitebox to download source code to their entire operating system and build 100% compatable clones either. Gee since they don't do that I would expect that Redhat would be big hypocrites.
Hey, how about this. Maybe Redhat has a business, and has employees and stockholders that they are responsable for. Hrm. Seems to me that each peice of software they buy or develope ends up being open source, isn't that funny for a company that doesn't give a shit?
Seems that they would behave more like original Suse did and rely on closed source management tools like Yast, or be like Gentoo, whose founder now works for Microsoft.
Give me a break. All Redhat does is:
1. Charge money for support
2. Protect their trademarks (which if you don't protect you loose unlike copyrights and patents. It takes a active effort to protect trademarks or they are invalid and anybody could use Redhat icons and call themselves redhat; including MS or IBM)
3. Don't provide binary downloads for free, except thru Fedora and Rawhide.
But they do provide the source code for everything they use... which is pretty open source, isn't it?
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.'"
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.
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."
This is actually a really good point; 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. Reasons for this are twofold:
1. Speakers use the PowerPoint as a substitute for actually knowing the topic; they just go over whatever it says on the screen, rather than being able to articulate the topic.
2. PowerPoint is a one-way communications mechanism; you can't readily make drastic changes to a PowerPoint presentation on-the-fly, the way that you can with a whiteboard. When I hold team meetings, I generally just write down the key points on a whiteboard, and as ideas get brought up, they get written down. Sure, it's low-tech, but it works a hell of a lot better than PowerPoint.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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.
Sorry, but I have no enthusiasm for sever-side anything. Cuts too close to home.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
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.
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.
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...
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 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//
My experience with Exchange has been that it falls over frequently. That was a long time ago now, and I imagine it's much improved, but instability was the hallmark of my Exchange experience for some time. The MTBF was probably about 3-5 days.
That said, I will never ever again deploy an Exchange server to one of my client sites. If a client insists, I will terminate the contract or require additional compensation due to the headache. It would never come to that though, because I would simply outsource the entire deployment to an Exchange service company (and it sounds to me like Dan Bercell works for one of these). Exchange is not trivial to manage, and requires careful setup and tuning. It has a reputation for this amongst IT professionals (at least in my circles). This is why Exchange service providers have so many clients: IT professionals in general don't want the headache.
There are many products that integrate with Exchange. It would be overgeneralization to say that they all suck; clearly, there is variance as with any group of software from diverse vendors. However as third-party products they can't afford to suck to the degree that Microsoft can afford to: MS users are locked-in (as I will elaborate below).
I disagree; MS has shown that it is quite happy to foist buggy products on its users repeatedly until eventually responding to outcry by beginning development of a better solution. Witness, for example, Windows 98SE and Windows ME. This isn't to say that this is what is going on; rather, it says that it's entirely possible. MS does not have to respond quickly to customer complaints, because its software is compatible with MS software and third-party products written especially for it... and nothing else. MS software is a tremendous pain in the ass to integrate with other products. If you're using Exchange, you'd better be running SQL server, and your clients had better be Outlook, and if you want webmail it had better be IIS, and you would be crazy to use a non-MS CRM solution - or you may find you have a tremendous headache on your hands. Of course, this all has to run on Windows. Want to swap out Exchange? Well, now you have to give up all the extra bells and whistles for all the other components, which depend on having MS products end-to-end. Outlook loses shared calendaring, you'll require additional third-party stuff to integrate IIS, it's probably nearly impossible to integrate well with Active Directory, and I don't even think CRM will work without exchange, etc etc.
MS locks its users in by keeping its integration in-house or to licensees. That's a big business for them, and they're doing a good job of selling access to their monopoly without giving up their lock on it.
This is also unsound. There may be another reason why corporations all over the world continue to use Outlook. I propose that that reason is that there are no alternatives, because only Outlook has the groupware and calendarin
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.