Slashdot Mirror
Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal
Nic Doye writes "Dag Wieers responds to Mark Shuttleworth's recent request to ask major Enterprise Linux distributions to synchronise releases, claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.' He's confessing to playing Devil's Advocate here, but it is an interesting view from someone with a large amount of experience in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS space."
claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'
Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."
So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?
I don't think he needs to be playing devil's advocate. I think what he's saying makes a lot of sense.
When an enterprise buys new hardware, they want the software to "just work" on it. It would be expensive for them to do the work themselves, so they are happy to pay someone else to do it. This is the value-added service that Red Hat gives. This is what an enterprise pays for.
It would be ludicrous to give your *competitor* this service for free *before* you give it to your customer. Sure, once you do the work, others can benefit -- that's part and parcel of free software. But you are allowed (I'm going to even say *expected*) to charge for your services.
Because Canonical and Red Hat are going after the same market, it is inevitable that there will be some overlap of effort. If Canonical wishes to use the work that Red Hat does, they merely have to wait until Red Hat releases.
But what worries me more here is that Canonical seems to miss the point where *creating a working distribution* is a money making opportunity. They seem to see it as a loss leader and they will charge for "support"; where "support" means hand-holding the user. Perhaps I'm wrong. I really hope I am.
Until companies understand that providing solutions and creating capability is the service where all the money is, we're not going to see the explosive growth in Free software that I'm hoping for. I had hoped that Canonical understood this. I still hope it's true, but I'm less optimistic.
I don't think this level of laziness should be encouraged
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Not quite sure of that. A fortune 500 company I know has ceased new orders for Microsoft and investing in a Linux desktop. It is at the tender stage where where if the CIO gets a massive pricing cut the program could be nixed an not unixed.
Microsoft is under sever pressure to get it's pricing down and quality up. They falter much more, knowing Linux will be the next fad want to have skill. And those that know Linux, getting Ubuntu, RedHat and SUSE working together is much easier than a NT to AD migration, plain and simple.
Just push Open Office and FireFox to the desktops first, nice and immediate MS-Office savings and a nice prep for the conversion. And if the MS salesperson says "Linux what?" You say the OS we are using to replace MS-Windows. Gets a pretty hefty discount if you can show you mean business. Your company wins either way.
The danger is that if the kernel ABI was stable, then the hardware manufacturers would think they were able to get away with releasing drivers only as binary blobs, without Source Code. This of course is highly undesirable. It also raises the nightmare possibility that repairing a deeply-embedded, totally-overlooked yet potentially fatal bug could cause major breakage. (XP SP2, and Vista UAC, I'm looking at you.)
If you want a stable ABI and binary-only drivers, then fork one of the BSDs. Hell, you can even cage the Source Code up and release the whole kernel binary-only. Recompiling something occasionally is a price I'm quite willing to pay for software freedom.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Correction: I am a sock puppet for CentOS :)
But seriously, one cannot have his own opinion anymore ?