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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!"
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.
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'
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...
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