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Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise?
Tony Mobily has written a thought-provoking editorial for Free Software Magazine that makes the bold prediction of Red Hat's eventual demise at the hands of Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. Calling on memories of Red Hat alienating their desktop user base to focus on their corporate customers and making money, Mobily states that many of those alienated desktop users are also system administrators who now feel more comfortable with Ubuntu and will make the choice to use Ubuntu Server over Red Hat now and in the future.
But there is a company behind Ubuntu - Canonical. They offer professional support for those who want it. Of course, Red Hat is much larger, more entrenched and more experienced, but I think that outside of the US the situation isn't as clear cut.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Why do so many people say that Ubuntu's not acceptable to enterprise because it doesn't have support, there's no one to blame, etc? Has no one ever gone to ubuntu.com and seen that big friggin' link at the top of the front page, which says "support"?
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
Alternatively, has anyone ever actually used RedHat support? *I* wasn't impressed...
Canonical, Shuttleworth's company, will support it.
One advantage Fedora has over Ubuntu is that Fedora releases a multi-disk set of packages. I work with computers that can't connect to the Internet, and I've found that the Fedora CDs almost always have all the packages I need. That's a huge benefit for those computers.
I guess I could be saved by utility that analysis the entire set of packages I'd need in order to install a given package on my computer. If I had a utility like that, I could walk over to an Internet-connected computer, download those packages onto a CD-R, and then install them on the computer that can't connect to the Internet. Or.... Ubuntu could start putting together CD/DVD sets that contained a larger fraction of popular packages than they can fit on one CD. Either development would let me kick Fedora out of the picture.
Are you on fucking crack? Have you EVER sold Linux to an executive oversight committee? That's rhetorical question because you haven't. There are only 2 names that non-tech senior execs recognize, RedHat and Novell. You put Ubuntu on a powerpoint slide and your sales pitch is in the drink. The fact is, what you use at home has very little to do with what is used in the enterprise. I brefly tried to sell SuSE to the same types of people before the Novell acquisition and it was always a "we know what RedHat is, we'll sign off on that" situation. With the Novell aquisition, SuSE finally managed to get traction. Ubuntu will never get there unless they find a way to sell their brand to non-geeks, the ones who sign the POs.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I am a linux SA for a fortune 250 company. We use RedHat on 500 servers, not cause I like that distrobution the most, but because its certified with our applications, jboss, oracle, webjet, etc. We can't do billion dollar database transactions and be SOX compliant with out being able to show certifications of applications. Thats just how it is folks
Redhat's enterprise support is a joke, they will find any excuse to not "support your configuration".
When I call Novell, I talk to actual engineers who can help me, not some dipship $5.15/hr college student who is reading from a queue card.
Generally I agree that RedHat is a crappy product compared to other Linuxes like Ubuntu and Suse. The flip side is that with Novell i.e. Suse AFAIK you don't have a project like Centos, which is binary compatible with the RedHat ES/AS product but is free and you get patches. This can be an advantage if you want to create a test setup for a product has been certified for RedHat ES/AS but are on a shoestring budget and don't want the hassle of dealing with the issues that can arrise if you try to install that same prodcut on Fedora or Ubuntu. Oracle products are a case in point. Installations of Oracle Application server, Database... the list goes on... that go without a hitch on RedHat ES/AS and Centos can be problematic on Fedora. Pracitcally every manufacturer of commercial Linux software certifies his products to work with certain versions of RedHat ES/AS so it is hard to avoid using Red Hat unless you are willing to put in the extra time it takes to debug an installation of your RedHat certified Linux software on an uncertified Linux distro.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I meant a choice during the install procedure, when I finish a install of fedora I can have my system correctly installed with all the options I need, gcc, dev packages and etc.
:-D
Yes, because how hard is it to pop open a terminal and type the following lines to solve your problem:
apt-get install gcc-4.0
apt-get install make
apt-get build-dep gnome
There ya go--all the gnome-dev headers, gcc, and make. Just about EVERY program in the Ubuntu and Debian repositories honors build-dep.
Also if the program is already packaged I usually don't need to compile it, so the apt-get command you refered is not very usefull, but it is good to know it exists.
See above. Obviously build-dep would be useful in the very circumstance you mentioned in your previous point.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."