Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats

Ian Price writes "Red Hat is shrugging off Microsoft's entry into the cluster computing space after Microsoft announced that it has completed the code for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 targeting high-performance computing. From the article: 'Scott Crenshaw, general manager of enterprise Linux platform at Red Hat, dismissed Microsoft's entry into cluster computing. "They're playing catch-up," he said. "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."' Crenshaw also commented with respect to Ubuntu: 'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'"

Comments

Re:Just like MS

[afaik_ianal]

Debian and its derivatives has a combined user base larger then RedHat

That doesn't conflict with what they said. RedHat couldn't give a shit about installs on home PCs - that's no longer the market they're going after. What they care about is entiprise class distros.

Yes, they want to pick up debian customers (increasing the size of the market), but the customers they really want, are the ones already willing to pay for linux (increasing their market share).

Re:Famous last words

[saden1]

When was the last time Redhad had revenue of 1 billion let alone in profit? The key statistics you should be looking at is not historical stock price, which is highly inflated by the gamblers in wall street, but their war chests. Microsoft had 34 billion of pure profit on 42 billion in revenue last year while Redhat had on 230 million in profit on 278 million in revenue. Both really good margins but I'd rather be MS than Redhat.

Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[cowbutt]

That's exactly it.

Fedora's catching up fast, but Debian and Gentoo are still in the lead with respect to the number of applications available within their main package repositories. That's why their package management tools appear to work better - it's actually down to all the hard work that's been put in by the package maintainers though; the tools are nothing special (rpm provides equal or better functionality to dpkgs and ebuilds, and apt is available for rpm as well as yum).

The trouble is that the lesser number of packages for Fedora/RH encourages newbie and intermediate users to indiscriminately install packages from random places, with the expected results. If, however, you pick a handful of co-operative package repositories (e.g. dag + rpmforge only, or fedora extras + livna only, or ATrpms only), things work out pretty well. For packages that aren't available, it's best to learn to roll your own, either by porting packages from other versions/distros, or upgrading existing packages, or from scratch.

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Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[kjart]

How is the package manager relevant to the article? They are talking about cluster and high-performance computing - not about desktop OS's. RTFS (Read The Fucking Summary) please.

Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[joe 155]

well, the article isn't really about this, but as a fedora user I feel like I should at least counter some of your claims:

YUM works very well in FC5, it has made keeping software up to date really easy, far more than on windows. everything does it pretty much strait away; so for me it's great. They do have a GUI one aswell, but that doesn't seem to be as fast and I like the information... so run it from the command line

You also don't need to look through random websites, you already get 3 repositories with the distro, but it's really easy to add another (I've got livna) in there. These will contain pretty much all the software you could ever want to find

you really should consider trying fedora again. it's such a good little OS. anyway, if you do you should go to http://www.fedorafaq.org/ it contains a load of helpful information about how to get everything going. Also, it's not fedora's fault that some proprietary stuff doesn't work out of the box - it's free speech and wants to stay that way - we really should be praising them for this, not condeming them because it might take a little more effort to get some things working. Anyway, give it a go.

What is the problem?

[deadline]

Red Hat does not offer a competing product, so what is the problem? There are many "cluster distributions" out there, but neither Red Hat, Suse, or any other major vendor have a well integrated cluster version of Linux. There are things like Rocks, Oscar, Warewulf, and companies like Scalable Informatics, or Basement Supercomputing are there if you need help.

Re:Microsoft and Ubuntu not a threat

[jalefkowit]

So, unless something has changed in the last few years, Ubuntu is going to have to do the same -- go where the money is (corporations) or die.

As long as Mark Shuttleworth is willing to pour his not-inconsiderable personal fortune into Ubuntu, they're not going to be hurting for money.

Shuttleworth said in his Slashdot interview that he views Ubuntu almost as a not-for-profit:

I'd very much like to make the distro project sustainable, because I've never had the privilege to work with such talented guys who work as hard as this team, and they deserve to be rewarded and to know that people appreciate the value they add every day. If it doesn't work out that way, though, I'm honoured to consider it a gift back to the open source world, which played such a critical role in helping me build Thawte. So I hope it's commerce, though it may turn out to be philanthropy. Either way, it's still cheaper than going back to space, or hooking up with fast planes/boats/women, which I supposed would be Plan B.

Ubuntu fans

[jagdish]

Ubuntu may have a small user base, but from what i have seen they sure are rabid fans. (my neighbour goes around people's houses and distributes cds of ubuntu for free. he even offers to install it for them)