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."

Comments

Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

[Chandon Seldon]

Yes. Shuttleworth would benefit from synchronized releases. If there wasn't some advantage for his project, he wouldn't have suggested it. What he's suggesting is that everyone else would benefit too.

Sure, Red Hat puts a lot of effort into hardware support backports. But if Ubuntu, Debian, Novel and Red Hat all standardized on the same kernel releases for their six-month release cycles then hardware vendors would have one platform to target instead of four. That might very well increase vendor cooperation - even to a sufficient extent that Red Hat would get better hardware support than they have now with less investment.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

[humphrm]

From what I've seen, hardware vendors only target Novell and Red Hat right now, and Ubuntu and Debian are afterthoughts. And frankly the hardware vendors don't do a very good job of targeting those distro's anyway. I'm in a huge enterprise shop and we're always scratching our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way now when the SW vendors are saying "Yeah, that's available in the kernel now, but it'll be a while before we officially release & support it." We ask the HW vendors about official support from the distro, and they say "Isn't this supposed to be open source? Can't you just build a new kernel that supports this, with these drivers we'll give you?" They don't seem to understand that enterprise shops don't get support from the major distros for custom kernels. Then Sun jumps in every once in a while and says they're going to release their own distro that follows their own (x86) hardware release, just like their SPARC line, but then they fall behind in releasing hardware because it's waiting for the distro... and so it goes. GAH!

We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn. I think vendors just talking to each other would solve half the problem. I don't know what the rest of the solution is.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

[Jim Hall]

I'm in a huge enterprise shop and we're always scratching our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way now when the SW vendors are saying "Yeah, that's available in the kernel now, but it'll be a while before we officially release & support it." We ask the HW vendors about official support from the distro, and they say "Isn't this supposed to be open source? Can't you just build a new kernel that supports this, with these drivers we'll give you?" [...] We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn.

Then you're doing it wrong. I manage a fairly large Enterprise environment, currently 600+ servers that is about 1/3 Linux, and we don't have chaos. We've run Linux in our Enterprise since about 1999, so we're not new to this. And we're currently consolidating another 500+ servers from other parts of the Enterprise, most of which are Linux. We haven't had these problems that you describe. Why? Because we work with our vendors. We don't just buy any hardware, or any config, and hope it will run Linux. Instead, we have a process to order hardware, and we do our homework first. When we purchase hardware that we know will run Linux, we specify to the vendor "Must be certified for RHEL5" or similar. So the vendor will only give us a quote for hardware that we know will work in our environment.

And do you know what happens when we do that up front? Things work.

This is easy because IBM and Dell and all the other (major) hardware vendors know that Enterprise IT shops like yours and mine run Linux. So they work hard to ensure Linux works with the hardware they sell. And at least with IBM and Dell (we use them a lot) they will certify their hardware for several key Linux distros. RHEL is a major distro with a lot of third-party software support (Oracle, WebLogic, PeopleSoft, ...) so it's often certified first.

Heck, at least in the case of IBM and Dell (and I'm sure with other vendors) you can get your Linux support directly from them. One support center if you have problems with the hardware or operating system. And with their third-party relationships, you can often call the same support center for problems with storage (EMC, ..), certain software, networks, etc. (Disclaimer: while this is available to us, we prefer to use Red Hat to support our OS, and the hardware vendor to support our hardware components. This is mainly because it makes purchasing licenses simpler. To get Linux support from IBM or Dell, you need to order your RHEL entitlements from IBM or Dell. As a University, it's actually easier for us to order entitlements separately from Red Hat than to do it as a single purchase through IBM or Dell - alas, that's how our purchasing department works.)

And no, we aren't lagging behind in the latest hardware. When the latest blades came out from IBM, they supported Linux. When the latest multi-core systems came out from Dell, they supported Linux. Everything works great from the moment we take it out of the box. We've never "scratch[ed] our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way" and we don't compile custom kernels. If that's how you support your Enterprise, you need to re-think what you're doing.

Group benefit

[debatem1]

Synchronizing the major distro releases helps to distribute testing and integration load among the enterprise supported distros while helping upstream developers by giving them fixed integration deadlines. All of that is good for Linux, and helps to keep distros and upstream vendors doing what they're good at, which enterprise loves. Which begs the question: is Red Hat thinking that growing the enterprise Linux space is harmful to its interests?

Re:Who really benefits?

[mrbluze]

Is there something I'm missing completely here, or are the comments above complete non-sequiturs?

Neither distro you mention, IMHO, is targeting home users in the way that Ubuntu is. You don't see friendly smiling people holding hands, one or two clicks to download, plain english on the front page and so on, to the degree that Ubuntu's homepage has it. You don't get offered free discs (I got 5 once, left them on the coffee-room table and after two months half the department was using Ubuntu).

Opensuse.org: Nice front page, three options - I clicked download - then I look at a complex table and it fails the WifeTest(TM) dismally.

Fedoraproject.org: When I did my WifeTest(TM), she went to fedora.com, then fedora.org (nice pictures of Mario but no distro). Then we found the site and again, she doesn't know what a freakin i386 is. "I have a laptop, does it say laptop?", she says.

Ubuntu.com: she guessed the right domain, clicked download after looking at the screen for a few minutes, then figured "I must have a standard computer" and started downloading. WifeTest(TM) said she would have bought or requested free CD's except she knew I could burn an ISO for her.

They are good, I agree with you - no worse than Ubuntu, probably. But marketing is everything when like is against like.

Mark Shuttleworth's response to competition.

[lazy_nihilist]

Here is Mark Shuttleworth's insightful response when I asked him, "Why would Red Hat cooperate with Ubuntu, especially now that Ubuntu also has its sights set on the server market. Don't they consider Ubuntu a threat?"

Let Shuttleworth sync Ubuntu with RHEL

[fadir]

From my point of view only Ubuntu would benefit from such a synchronized release schedule. Well, I guess then it's best that they change their release cycle to Red Hat's. That's not too difficult to achieve as RH announced its schedules quite early.

So if you want free beer - go and get it yourself!

Re:Not big on Fedora...

[techno-vampire]

Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.

Rant away! That's part of what Slashdot is for!

The reason I call Fedora "geeky" is that it is, as you say, a rolling beta for RHEL. It's not stable, it's not supposed to be and it never will be. Although its marketing people don't like to admit it, Fedora is bleeding edge. That means it's going to take more work from the users to be productive than it would in a distro that's not changing as fast. I see it as a distro for geeks who like playing with their systems and want to have the newest versions of everything, whether they're really ready or not.

As far as getting mp3 support, and other things like that, I agree with you, but I understand their POV. They want to put out a distro that's free of patent, license or other legal encumbrances, and let the user add those difficult programs on their own. I'd rather they were less stiff about it, but they have strict principles and I'm not going to complain about their sticking to them.

Last, I say that Ubuntu isn't geeky because to me, at least, it's designed for people escaping from Windows. It's easy to install, it brings across your Windows Documents if you ask it, you don't need to remember a root password, and for the most part, It Just Works. Some things that are easy to do in other distros seem to be impossible, such as booting into a fully working system at init 3, but that's probably because the average Ubuntu user will never need to do that except in an emergency, so init 3 is set up for repair only. I know that a Windows user with no understanding of Linux can install and run Ubuntu because I've seen it done. I'd not ask that same person to try it with Fedora!