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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.
Stop the presses! :)
I was one of those disaffected desktop users, but I still use RHEL (er...actually CentOS) for server machines that do real work. If you don't need bleeding edge desktop gadgets, it's still OK for desktop use as well. Ragging on RedHat because they had the temerity to focus on the part of their business that generated profit for them seems a bit harsh. There's plenty of other distros to choose from, including Ubuntu, if you want to live in the fast lane.
Cheers,
Nothing is stopping you from paying for support if you want to. The flexibility of Free/Open Source Software is that if you don't want to pay for support, you don't have to.
The article itself is a joke, and does not actually detail any valid reasons about why Ubuntu will displace Redhat in the market. The 5th and 6th paragraphs are nothing more than "I want to brown-nose Mark Shuttleworth" crap that also does not feed the main argument of the commentary^H^H^H^H rant. THe last two paragraphs which barely have any meat on them are nothing more than rants not backed by any citations, evidence, deep analytical thought, etc. The crux of the article revolves around Redhat alienating their desktop "not paying a penny freeloaders", which is retarded because a) redhat's revenue shotup when they mandated fees and b) umm, whats Fedora again ?
While I commend Ubuntu and everyone else for their efforts on the desktop front I think it is very important to note that beating Redhat is going to require quite the effort, skill and resources. Redhat still commands other distros in the areas of Income, Innovations, and the holy-grail-of-almost-everything: Marketing. SUSE has been trying to beat Redhat for how hard and how long ?
(Maybe this company is trying for the "Dvorak-angle", which is to write something dumb and generate lots of attention to a whole lot of nothin')
I remembered the CEO of the company I worked for sometime ago (they are making an Expedia like web portal for Mexico tourism).
He called me to his office (I was the "Open Source evangelist") and asked me what was the good thing in Open Source (specifically Linux at that time). After I tried to explain him, trying to supress my "enthusiastic bachellors" spirit, about the benefit of using an open source solution to do what they were doing (a "service based" buisness, instead of a "software" based company), he told me (something I will always remember) that free things are not good for companies, because it is the total oposite of an economy and, for there to be an economy there assets/services must be traded for money. In the absense of this (e.g. with "free lunch") a company can not be inside the "economic circle". [sorry, rough english translation of what I remember].
If I were to tell him now, something like 5 years later, I would tell him that, in reality Open Source (at least GPL/Linux) is not a "payless" or "gratis" asset. Because, when any company uses the software they have to (a) contribute to the community (pay, in terms of intellectual property) and (b) pay for support/integration, because the advantage of the closed source solutions is the cohesion they achieve in their software (something really nice about Microsoft products is that they work happy togheter, although for some people this is something bad because they "tie" the client), unlike open source software for which there exist thousands of possible combinations which, if the company is lucky, would be able find a half assed script to make two make 2 programs poorly interact with each other.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Ubuntu is very nice. But it's server edition doesn't have the sanction of the interest of the rest of the world. Indeed for better or worse, RH has the attention of many entities, ranging from Oracle to IBM.
And to say that Ubuntu's server must be excellent because its desktop-focused distros are is like saying that Ford's trucks must be great because their cars are cool. Outwardly, it would appear that could be the case, but in reality market forces are completely different in cars and truck markets, just like they are in server and desktop distribution.
Ubuntu has done a rational job (and still incomplete) of making a viable desktop-focused OS. Yes, admins use it. Yes, they tend to use in one place (desktop) what they know for another application-- the server. Yet Ubuntu isn't that far away from RH. And the number of admins using strictly Linux is still very small, although growing a bit each day.
Summary: the lines don't join together in the logic. Yes, Ubuntu is cool, but it in no way spells the end of RH and it's juvenile to think so.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
... is they live in a dream world.
I wonder when the last time was that any company got Microsoft to fix *any* bug they found in a released version of software?
It seems like even giants of industry can't get them to fix holes any faster than peons.
Interesting idea, but the wrong target. Red Hat have spent years and much skill building up their strong position in the enterprise and no other Linux outfit is likely to be dislodging them any time soon.
Much more vulnerable are Novell/SuSE and their rather hamfisted "me too" strategies and lesser distros like Mandriva. Those are the ones Ubuntu is likely to take market share from. SuSE could be especially vulnerable since their OpenSuSE "community" distro is arguably just a corporate sham with very little of a true community about it.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Did anyone actually find a defense of his central argument in that "editorial?" All I saw was a bunch of Mark Shuttleworth cheerleading. Now, here's why he is wrong:
1) RedHat is a large Linux vendor and gives business people someone to deal with reliably.
2) RedHat has an entrenched userbase.
3) RedHat Enterprise Linux is a good distribution in its own right.
4) RedHat has great support from "enterprise vendors" such as Oracle.
RedHat is threatened, but it's manageable. It's the sort of competition that will make them better, not threaten their ability to survive and thrive.
I've used Ubuntu and think it's easy to use and all-around great. That said, I use Redhat and Fedora distributions extensively. I like the amount of big-picture experimentation, cutting-edge tools/libraries, and directly funded improvements (everything from the kernel to eclipse) that make it into the Fedora releases, and I like the known quantity, high-end hardware support, and commitment to long-term maintenance of the Redhat releases.
Friendly rivalries should stay friendly, especially when core foundations of the free software development model are under attack from government mandated and enforced DRM in hardware, extortion threats to the north american internet infrastructure, and increasing attempts to tie popular hardware APIs to closed platforms.
"he told me (something I will always remember) that free things are not good for companies"
Gee, where can I find him, I've got a whole lot of air he can buy or cease using if he feels it doesnt cost enough.
"because it is the total oposite of an economy"
He should probably go back and read a few books on economy again. The ultimate goal of free market capitalism is to encourage the most effective production of 'wealth' possible, with the endgame being the end of scarcity, when more or less everything the average person needs or wants costs close to nothing.
Of course, that is the total opposite of protectionism, where the legal system protects inefficient production from competition.
The economies of opensource are the economies of the free market. As components are perfected and reused and shared, they decrease redundant work and leads to far lower costs for the companies involved; mass-used and distributed code approaches lack of scarcity. At the same time, the costs are shifted into areas that actually do cost; support and other currently labour intensive and not easily automated tasks. The incentive becomes to provide faster better more cost effective support and customization, thus driving along the economic cycle.
"It may not happen in the short term, but .."
It won't happen in the long term either. Yes, Ubuntu is becoming ever more popular, but this is an expanding market. There are new users arriving on the 'Linux' scene every second. Red Hat may not grow at the same pace as Ubuntu in the short, medium, or long term, but it will grow.
All Ubuntu has done has made the competition for new desktop customers more intense. Red Hat will continue to specialise in the server market where it will continue to grow due to providing valued sevice.
Market trends determine the prospects of a company as much as (if not more than) the competition.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
For one I doubt that a project that has the financial backing of a one man band will knock RH from its throne. Even if the man made $500M (minus the considerable cost of his little trip into space). RH has ten digit assets, a ton of A list partners and it actually has solutions besides the OS. The Enterprise needs solutions. A new kid on the block with a DVD will not cut it with the Global 2000. You need the building blocks that help these players to achieve their objectives. That means professional services, training, 24/7 support, certified hardware and, again, partners that they need to integrate these pretty complex solutions.
Several of Tony's arguments seem to be creative at best and lack substance. Did the packaged version of RH flop? Looking at RH today I tend to disagree as their packaged offering was the precursor of the succesfull business model they now have. It's called Evolution. You try something, shave and mold and hopefully get to a point where it works better. And it seems RH got it right given the fact that they are the leading vendor in this space. Were they too expensive? Well, if something like $100 for a packaged version is too much for a company I think that company should reevaluate their existence. According to Tony the Fedora split was "underfunded and the "community involvement" was patchy and disorganised". Besides the fact that any new project will always have growing pains, in the end it's the result that counts. Maybe Tony should install FC5, subscribe to the mailing lists and browse the ton of helpful websites focused on FC. I did and I see a vibrant community that is delivering a distro that gets better all the time. So in what way did RH "abandoned its desktop audience, to focus on the more lucrative corporate market"? What do you call the free Fedora Core distribution? What do you call the commercial desktop solution that RH offers? Seems they have been successful in sponsoring and creating solutions that will cater to more instead of less.
Tony continues to be creative with his statement that Shuttleworth "divert tons, and tons, and tons of GNU/Linux users away from Red Hat Linux, and towards Ubuntu Linux". Looking at RH's latest quarterly results I don't see them loosing "tons and tons of GNU/Linux users" to Ubuntu. Googling around I found no supporting information about the mass defection of RH customers to Ubuntu like Tony suggests.
All in all Tony has not presented a single fact to support his statements. He only makes bold claims which border on unsubstantiated RH/FC trashing. His feable attempt at writing an "editorial" should be taken with a rock of salt of similar size used for Maureen O'Gara's poo.
on Ubuntu, I won't be installing anything but CentOS and RedHat 4 on my servers. I installed Ubuntu on my brand new laptop and I run it on my desktop mind you.
Yes, IBM DB2, is certified to run on Ubuntu and IBM will support it. Same thing for MySQL but until something like Tivoli Storage Manager or WebSphere Application Server or BEA or any other host of products are certified and are listed as "supported configurations" by vendors, Ubuntu will only be for non-commerical applications in the corporate world.
Our model is RedHat for stuff that requires a support contract (WebSphere, TSM) and CentOS for development boxes or things like our Apache servers, CUPS servers and what not. It provides the same interface and knowledge as the RHEL stuff so there's no need to document something different.
I honestly think what's going to eat RHAT's lunch in the smaller markets is CentOS.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
There is another major reason too. Third party support. Companies like IBM, HP, EMC (both the SAN part and VMWare), Veritas (Symantec), etc. feel MUCH more comfortable releasing driver / application packages for a distro that has a real company behind it that is "enterprise" oriented. This basically means that they support RedHat and Suse. Lucky for me, CentOs works as a RedHat replacement in all cases.
It also has to do with enterprise deployment. When Debian / Ubunto gets to similar levels as RedHat in the enterprise, we will start to see support for it.