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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.
I really don't see this happening. Red Hat has a good presence in the server market, where as Ubuntu doesn't have that yet. I know Ubuntu is the "in" thing right now, but I don't see it toppling other vendors with established business models.
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"
One reason that Ubuntu will never be accepted: they don't offer the things that make beancounters sleep well at night. They don't have an "enterprise edition." They give it away for free - it can't be any good, right?
Ultimately, Red Hat targets corporate clients. Ubuntu doesn't. And it's not like that's bad!
I completely agree. I dumped Red Hat after Fedora Core 4. The worst mistake Red Hat made was to fork the distro into a "we don't eat our own dog food distro." Back in the day when Red Hat was free for download I would actually buy their distro to help support them. When they went the Fedora Core route I was disappointed to say the least. If Red Hat wants to survive the coming Ubuntu storm they need to go back to the way they were before. It's not what is, but what is perceived and by forking like they did they turned a lot of people off to even installing their distro.
Ubuntu was certified for IBM's db2: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/db2cert
However I think Ubuntu will only be used in small companies as desktops. Most people I know use either FreeBSD or Windows 2003 as their server OS.
My prediction is that Novell will gain significant marketshare in the enterprise OS sector. Especially after all those Netware servers migrate to SuSE.
Also, Novell seems to support the non-enterprise users more than Redhat (and their Opensuse distro is much more stable than Fedora).
As both a bean counter and a programmer (yes, I've bother with a degree in each), I call bullshit.
/. responses are knee-jerk. "OH EM GEE, teh Red Hat is making teh profitz!!!111!one". Just because they've grown into an OSS company that wants to make it their living (aka get paid to do the work and have others paid to work for them), why should they be demonized? Wouldn't you want to work on your pet project all day and get paid for it (if you don't already)? What if you could also make a share of profits too? Can you say right here, right now, that you wouldn't do that?
As many have mentioned, a support base is a key demand for a for-profit company. Why is it wrong to want help to keep your systems up, it pays the bills for other techs too. Reliability in your IT infrastructure keeps up productivity, which in turn makes for revenues. So would you as the sysadmin rather use Red Hat and call them when something goes wrong (which you can tell upper management), or rather have to hope for a reply from the community or fix it yourself, all the while being hounded by upper management because it's not fixed and the company is loosing money?
Secondly, these
I'm not saying their product hasn't gone downhill. I stopped using Red Hat shortly after Fedora. If they don't improve their product, then something will replace it down the road. But what will? No one knows, but I'm doubting Ubuntu, at least at the moment.
The low end always wins (eventually)
PCs (nearly) killed mainframes. Windows nearly killed unix, until free unix came along. Linux is eating into windows server. Ubuntu is eating into Red Hat.
Eventually the mass market product overruns the corporate product, but it takes a lot of time.
Ubuntu is better than Fedora in Desktop Market? People keep saying, ubuntu is cool, but I really don't see why it is? To me it is torture. Worse than Fedora on default fonts selection, official repositories do not have recent versions of software. Fedora do not have meaningless patches for should be default and consistent interfaces (like nautilus, add panel dialog etc.) It's way easier to find rpm of a release than .deb version. Also what's the point of having something installed and waiting hours for internet download time, instead of downloading a DVD while you were sleeping, and get everything at once.
For me ubuntu is no more than a buzz word, which uses Debian as a source of fame.
I was a professional Linux admin for 3 1/2 years. I ran Debian. Sure, we had one copy of Red Hat Enterprise because we purchased a library system that insisted on using Red Hat. But I preferred Debian. And if Ubuntu has paid support, it has a great future.
What kind of hand holding are you referring to? As a Debian user, I could say that Red Hat has a lot more hand holding than Debian does. Get off your Red Hat high horse.
It's amazing what a bit of corporate ear bending can do.
If only they did that for the 000's of other more critical bugs out there.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
I'm one of those alienated system administrators. I've been working with Red Hat as my primary $WORK distribution since 1997. This year I started putting Ubuntu on servers and find it to be so much less hassle. Each Ubuntu server saves my employer probably thousands of dollars a year not just in licensing costs but TCO as a whole. And the sysadmin team here actually enjoys working with it rather than griping like "WTF did RHAT do it that way?!?"
Red Hat will still be king in some markets but Ubuntu is going to eat its lunch in the mainstream in the next few years if they don't make some major changes to their business model soon.
I'm a LONG TIME Redhat fan. I started at 4.0 and stayed on until FC4. There are several things that Redhat has stopped doing, owed to their business-school strategy that just doesn't work, here.
/etc/ldap and installs with enough "database" to get you started. Even without the nice LDAP GUI that Redhat made, I think this might be simpler and quicker. No complications, no stupid Java behemoth, just good native code like it should be.
:)
XCDRoast: the author of this program has his stuff together; he makes it available for many distros and in most places it works, but at Redhat they see fit to edit the code to get along with their SUID plan. It works, but are they going to shoehorn all packages like this? There are _thousands_.
LDAP: the OpenLDAP rpm that comes from the Fedora repo is at least 2 major releases old. Worse than that, it breaks. And it breaks in a way that leaves it completely useless. But I suppose that since they bought Netscape Directory, a bloated, oversized, shotgun-approach to flyswatting, they won't allow anyone to bring the smaller, tighter core product up to speed. In short, if you need LDAP, you use ND or recompile your own from a tarball. Hey, they've got a business to run!
And all those Linux games we *bought* hoping to keep Loki alive? You'll have to fight to make them work, and each time the libraries get upgraded, you'll need to fight'em again. Not in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has some strengths that are surprisingly wonderful. Very little translation (if ANY) from author to end-user. Using a *better* package manager, rolling projects in, editing the configs, and rolling them back out are painless. No dependency problems.
LDAP lives in
Remember those Loki games? Check the docs for the details; it's, as they say in these parts, "Breezy".
Their DOCUMENTATION. It's a Wiki. Not stuffy paperwork that never seems to be complete enough, or out of date. It's a living, growing document that helps us all enjoy the experience. Reading these docs made the LDAP install close-to-instantaneous. It made the Loki libraries the same way. It showed me in far more simple ways how to deal with Apache, which I thought I understood before.
I think it's because Ubuntu has no commercial bias; no reason to do anything other than the author's intentions with their code. There's no reason to do something that you and I don't need, because they have to make a headline. THIS is the right way to do Linux.
I've tried telling them at Redhat, but won't hear me.
Just like TribalVoice with PowWow, just like PCNews or whatever it was, and just like SCO, before they were sold to a (now dying) entity. But the Redhat-of-old was a warm friendly place for many of us to get started, and I'm thankful for that. Now Ubuntu can truly take us into the future, to do even bigger, brighter things!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov