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?"
"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
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.
Its always great fun making a PP presentation for management. They always come back again and again asking how much more information can be taken out. Until finally there is only 4-5 pages, and it does not say anything except basically adjectives.
:P
My last boss is funny though as he is an engineer and smart guy, but also a manager. So he would cause us to shrink the presentation down to a few slides, but we would have to keep making the font smaller because he wanted to be sure not to leave anything out, lol.
Yes, PP causes some strange things
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?
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
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
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!