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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.'"
I'm not convinced that this is unbiased, especially the claims that Novell adoption is slowing due to backlash. Give us the stats if you want, but let us draw our own conclusions. Also, why did the report separate Fedora and RHEL while not separating openSuSE and Novell SuSE? Certainly interesting data, but like I said, I don't really want their conclusions. On a side note, PostgreSQL seems to be used a lot more than I originally thought.
I did a survey of surveys and found them only 88.1% accurate.
The eWeek story got it wrong. Internetnews.com got it right. From their article: "in an interview with internetnews.com, Howells admitted that he lacked that empirical evidence to back up his allegation. "All we've got is the raw statistics," Howells said. "We expected general trends to be similar, but what we saw was a big divergence going from the two platforms being almost the same to one tripling in size. We were looking at various reasons for that, and there may be a number of reasons for that but we don't actually know the specific reason." Among the other reasons why Red Hat users may well have increased is the emergence of a new Red Hat release -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) -- which was released in mid-March just a few weeks ahead of when the Alfresco study began. Novell on the other hand had no similar product launch event at any point near the Alfresco study. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 690141
No, Novell's marketing is spot-on, it's the MS deal that's done it.
Novell haven't the faintest idea how to promote and articulate SUSE (do most people even know it's SUSE outside the geek community?) and are bleeding the people who can at a rapid rate, at least the ones I know.
CxO's don't give a toss about deals with MS, they care about brands and RedHat are as strong as they come backed up with better marketing.
I don't work for RedHat and I'm a Mac bigot, so I think I'm reasonably balanced.
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.
Can someone explain it to me...why Microsoft went into these deals anyway?
Yes.
Winux
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Sorry, I don't programme outdoors; I'm in my parents' basement!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
PostgreSQL has grown dramatically since 8.x was released. Easy Windows support really helps because, like it or not, a lot of developers write on Windows and publish on Linux.
People tend to move to PostgreSQL when they find they need features MySQL lacks, get hung up on some of the odd issues MySQL can have, or find they have licensing issues with MySQL. The biggest drawback for PostgreSQL is that you actually have to configure it when you install it, or it will think it's running on a system with very minimal specs. It's also more complex than MySQL, but still nowhere near MS SQL Server 2005.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Gallup polls about U.S. presidential candidates typically survey about 1,000 likely voters, while Alfresco surveyed more than 10,000 people, he said.'"
I recall that my statistics professor explicitly pointed out a common mistake in statistics: "Contrary to what people typically believe, the size of the sample is often not as critical as getting an unbiased sample." If you call the home phone number of people during daytime and ask the ones who answer whether they are employed or not, you will not get good statistics. Regardless if you reach 1 000 or 10 000 people.
I have no idea if there is such a problem with the statistics presented here. I just want to point out their claim of sample size can not be taken to mean that their statistics are better than Gallup's.
Open Materials Database
> Can someone explain it to me...why Microsoft went into these deals anyway?
Yes.
Winux
And it'll be free and released under GPL3, right.
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.
. It is a good stategy, and some open source people really do fall for it. GPL3 from a corporate perspective is not a very positive thing. So i would think that community is already showing lots of divide, although that could just be because there are lots more people in it now.
So switching to the left hand puts you in a better mood?
FUD may not be so far from the mark. Large corporations are fairly conservative and risk-averse entities. If you can sew the seed of doubt with the people who control the money, they may be leery about using Linux in their enterprise unless they have the soothing lie of being free from any patent encumberance. By signing these deals, they create the perception that "this and only this" are 'safe' distributions.
Further, since they're deals focused (on the surface) of increasing interoperability, Microsoft gets to downplay the fact that they actively prevent others from working with their software. So, they spend some money and time with Novell to make sure things like file and printer sharing work more cleanly -- if you're gonna use Linux as a back-end technology, you'll do it with out blessing. This is a double edged sword, in that they can reinforce the claim that ONLY those distributions which have signed agreements with Microsoft aren't trampling on patents.
So, you water down the argument that MS products are completely proprietary which won't operate in the same environment as their competition (therefore pre-emptively watering down the claims they're a monopoly who doesn't play nice and staving off future anti-trust actions) and also poisoning the well of making people think that the rest of the open source stuff are violating patents and is therefore dodgy to use.
Ignore the fact that claiming to support interoperability for anyone BUT open source, or that the (unspecified) patents which people are allegedly infringing upon were actually things they stole from other people and then patented despite an abundance of prior art, and you have a great PR campaign to convince managers of large corporations the only 'safe' way to use Linux is in a context where Microsoft has given you permission.
It really is FUD and positioning yourself and selling your message. They're not doing anything because it will generally benefit the industry or make things more open and interoperable. It's about locking even more people into their way of doing it, and discrediting everyone else.
If lots of people see it as I've described, and say "well, screw Novell, Red Hat looks good", then they can definitely be reaping the benefit of a backlash against how much value the Novell deals actually bring to the consumer.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Indeed. I'm not sure why this point was made. n=1000 is generally enough to get statistically significant results. Having more than that in no way guarantees "more accuracy" or whatever they were trying to argue. What is important is the selection method. An evenly distributed, random, blind sampling of 1000 people is going to be far more accurate than a self-selected survey of 1,000,000 people with similar opinions. I'm not saying this is what happened in this case (or that Gallup polls are better), but ultimately the number itself is irrelevant to the accuracy of the report once you've crossed a certain threshold. You reduce your error, but you might simply end up with a small standard error centered on a biased response.