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Red Hat Reaping Benefits From Novell/MSFT deal?
Ho Kooshy Fly writes "It seems that at least one software group has seen the use of Red Hat substantially increase over Novell as of late. EWeek theorizes that this may be backlash from the patent deal with Microsoft. From the article: 'The survey's findings can also be extrapolated to the broader open-source software industry and are not limited to those enterprise customers using Alfresco software "because of the wide range of open-source and proprietary software use cases captured and the large sample size of the survey," [Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer] said. "We think these findings accurately reflect the broad technology trends across modern stacks in organizations of all sizes." Gallup polls about U.S. presidential candidates typically survey about 1,000 likely voters, while Alfresco surveyed more than 10,000 people, he said.'"
Not sure if I agree with you there. In theory, products quality should stand alone. In reality, there are a lot of directors of IT and CIOs who believe that Linux is a science project, and not a suitable server platform for important tasks. Until that sentiment is eroded, Linux and OSS will never gain the share it deserves. Strong marketing will help to erode that sentiment faster.
So if I were a company evaluating whether to choose Novell over Redhat based solely on the Microsoft deal, I would definitely choose Redhat. Novel's deal with Microsoft has so many exceptions in it (doesn't cover "clone" or "foundry" or "other" products) and contridictions between the two companies (GPLv3 is/isn't covered) that all it seems to do get Microsoft's attention better for their "who could we sue" list. Because the deal surely doesn't protect you from getting sued, given all the exceptions.
I would rather go with Redhat where there's far less confusion going on. They offer protection anyways, through OIN.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
We used Suse way before Novell bought it, and the deal with Microsoft while good for the board of Novell fails in every other respect. Open means choice - not fud or payments to Microsoft for 'mob insurance'.
Instead of keeping Suse - we moved distro and yes we are happy. Move back to Novell ? - no thank you.
I have a buddy in the oil and gas industry, he has a small geophysics firm. The firm writes software and their customers have eschewed Windows, they don't want windows server/client components anymore, they want Linux. It used to be that they got quite a bit of requests for Linux and Windows but nobody is asking for Windows anymore. Nine times out of ten the customers want the software available as an RPM for RHEL. They also test on CentOS and Fedora but the vast majority of their customers want it to work on RHEL. I found it very interesting when I discussed it with him.
The important phrase to take out of the article;
"Alfresco did not specifically ask community members the reason for their Linux choice"
So we have a self selecting sample, from which they've drawn conclusions on an issue they didn't even ask about. We're also left in the dark as to how Redhat compared to the other distros (like, for instance, flavour of the month Ubuntu) in recent months. So we don't know if the supposed surge in Redhat is more down to Redhat itself than disapproval of SUSE.
My analysis; this report is insignificant PR fluff, to which some fanboy has added cherry picked data to "prove" a political point he wished to make regardless.