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Red Hat — Stand Alone Or Get Bought?
head_dunce writes "It seems that this economy has inspired a lot of businesses to move to Linux, with Red Hat posting profits that beat everyone's expectations. There's a dark side to being a highly profitable company in a down economy, though — now there are talks of Citigroup and Oracle wanting to buy Red Hat. For a while now, we've been watching Yahoo fend off Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer so that they could stay independent, but the fight seems to be a huge distraction for Yahoo, with lots of energy (and money) invested. Will Red Hat stay independent? What potential buyer would make for a good parent company?"
Citigroup....
That belongs to the tax payers now, right? That means we will ALL own RedHat!
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My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
Support. It's a lot easier to call a vendor and bitch than it is to post your bitch on Slashdot. No wait...
Whereas I'm not too concerned about Red Hat Linux (especially since Oracle already has a version of it they brand as their own), my *real* concern is for JBoss, one of the best app servers out there.
If Oracle had not bought BEA, I'd think they'd buy up RH and replace oc4j/App server with JBoss, but since they *did* buy BEA, they now have WebLogic and JRockit; they'd probably just put JBoss out to pasture, which would leave a lot of folks who have deployed JBoss high-n-dry.
Yes, they wouldn't do it right away and yes, there's always the possibility of a fork, but it would make it that much harder of a sell to the boss who wanted to go with JBoss because it was a lot cheaper than what Oracle wanted for their app server.
I can't think of a good match. Maybe IBM just because IBM's service arm seems to be doing really well, but then that would be bad for the whole industry for IBM to own an enterprise Linux distro.
It would be kinda funny if Microsoft bought them and actually tried to make money off Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Does this mean we're going to have those "What's in YOUR wallet" commercials switch to "What's in YOUR computer?" I can see it now...
"Hi, I'm a Mac."
"Hi, I'm a PC."
"Hi, I'm a viking maurader. Bleeeeaaarrrgh!"
Red Hat Linux: Sneak attack, bitches.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
SCO is the obvious choice.
So Oracle and Citigroup are thinking of buying Red Hat, eh? Perhaps they envy the freedom that Red Hat possesses. Perhaps they wish to control Red Hat in a way that no others could. Did they hear a whisper from Microsoft?
I think that the worst possible thing is for Red Hat to be consumed by a larger company such as Citigroup or Oracle. Their statements and actions demonstrate little understanding or regard for the culture in Red Hat.
Their wish to buy Red Hat is akin to the wish to put a flowing river in a bucket. Once the water is in the bucket, it is no longer flowing.
To put it differently, to derive the benefits of Red Hat, they would either just buy the software they produce and use it, or buy their stock and sit on it. But as soon as they try to control it at their own whim, that which was free and living, will squirm away, somewhere else.
Imagine what will happen to all the customers, developers and channel resellers who trust Red Hat now. It will simply not be the same with a new master.
I hope Red Hat can maintain their indepence for the sake of everyone who depends on them.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Support. It's a lot easier to call a vendor and bitch than it is to post your bitch on Slashdot. No wait...
I would say it is much easier to post your bitch on Slashdot, but calling a vendor might be more productive.
It wouldn't surprise me to see IBM end up owning Sun, Red Hat and Microsoft in the end.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
Remind me, which company is currently turning a profit, Red Hat, or Canonical?
You are clearly not very familar with Red Hat at all so I'll let you in on a little secret. Red Hat is not making their money on desktop installs.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The problem with buying a company like Red Hat is very simple: you end up with nothing. It's a company basically of, by, and for open-source near-zealots.
If you buy it and try to control it, the talent leaves and you bought a client list.
I was wondering of there is a play now for IBM and Sun to take Red Hat under their wing as they move to the "Open Cloud"... That could set up IBM/Sun vs. Microsoft/Amazon/Yahoo?! Background info: http://cloudstoragestrategy.com/2009/03/sun-ibm-open-clouds-ahead.html
When I was at Red Hat, I assumed the scenario would be that Oracle would make a hostile takeover bid, as they are wont to do, and then IBM would come to the rescue with a competing offer that wouldn't gut the soul of the company quite as badly. Now that IBM is in talks with Sun, that seems less likely, unless the IBM/Sun deal falls through, in which case it's a no-brainer for IBM.
Failing that, the next best candidate, in terms of the good of the community, would be Intel. I mean no disrespect to AMD in this regard, because it's not really about hardware, but rather Intel's role as a technology mutual fund that happens to have CPU, chipset, and networking hardware in its portfolio. Adding a Linux vendor would further establish them as a developer of core computing technologies, in a role as a partner rather than a competitor to Oracle and IBM. Intel has a long history of working well with the open source community, which has certainly played a role in their acquisition of some top Red Hat talent over the past few years.
With all due respect to the many dedicated Linux engineers at Oracle, I don't trust Larry Ellison as far as I can throw him. Nor do I trust the Red Hat shareholders, who are overwhelmingly financial institutions on the brink of bankruptcy, to take any sort of long term view when considering competing offers, which is why I would not be shocked to see them cash out to Oracle, even knowing full well how the company would be gutted, because they so desperately need the money right now just to stay solvent. I just hope that when Oracle makes the move, which seems all but certain if the IBM/Sun deal goes through, that there's someone else around with a genuine commitment to the community and deep enough pockets to make a cash offer, since a stock deal under terms typical for large acquisitions wouldn't give the institutional shareholders the liquidity they need.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
The problem is that people like me install Ubuntu on thier home desktop machine. I understand apt and all of the debian specific configuration file locations.
When I go into work and have to work on the RHEL servers, I can mostly get yum and rpms to work for the server configuration that I want, but god damn if it isn't like pulling teeth.
Now that I have enough power, and I have to make a decision on which distro to get support from, do I go with something that I know (Debian/Ubuntu and Canonical?) or something that is similiar yet foreign (Redhat/RHEL)?
The last 3 servers that I've been in control of have been Ubuntu.
Java has been taken over by the corporate world. The way I see it, every time someone had a problem with it, they said "I know, I just add some XML, and name it with a 4 letter acronym or some cute coffee-inspired pun."
If you want quick and easy, try Qt. Even Eclipse plays nice with that.
If Sun and IBM combined with Oracle and RedHat, that would really make a powerhouse corporation in terms of offering Linux+Java based solutions. It would probably allow for a portfolio to truly compete against MS on most fronts even. I don't necessarily like the idea myself, and am not a big fan of Java itself. But the thought is compelling.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The software maker has started a "free-to-pay" marketing campaign to persuade businesses that they would save money by subscribing to its services because they would not have to hire as many Linux programmers.
They're using the Microsoft Argument. I wonder if they mentioned TCO.
That should be made clear.
It was only a Citi analyst that raised the possibility of Red Hat being a takeover target.
I think you underestimate how involved Red Hat is paying employees to contribute significantly to project components up and down the software stack that makes up the linux ecosystem. I don't think you can really say that all Red Hat does is support stuff they don't build. Their employees are there in the trenches impacting the roadmaps of a lot of components from the kernel on up. Sure Red Hat doesn't do it all, but no one can argue that don't do their fair share of the work in upstream project development.
They succeed as a business model exactly because they can position their development involvement in upstream projects as a value proposition for customers who need critical support services.
There are always going to be complaints about support, nothing is perfect. In fact I doubt one support model fits all possible customer needs..and that's fine. The proof is in the pudding. Red Hat is consistently retaining customer subscriptions in large enough numbers to sustain their business and more importantly for the larger open ecosystem taking that financial support and using it to paying for manhours to sustain the development of open technologies across a broad front of technologies...from the kernel on up.
I have to admit i've always been at a total loss as to why redhat could have the same sort of market cap as someone like Sun (at least pre-takeover rumours).
I suppose it's certainly more profitable to take other people's work and package it up, but what does that offer to a buyer?
RedHat is the leading corporate contributor to the Linux Kernel.
What they do for the buyer is make sure that their distro will work with certain software so that ISV's can certify the platform.
For example... You want to run SAP CRM. Maybe you can get it to work on Debian or Ubuntu, but SAP won't support it, and you likely need SAP support. They have certified it to run on RedHat Enterprise Linux so you can use that.
That's what most people care about. ISV support. If all you're doing is running a LAMP stack, then you probably don't care and will run CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu Server, etc. In fact, I believe a lot of hosting companies have been switching to CentOS ever since RedHat no longer provided a free version other than fedora.
They also have other products that run on RHEL.
Dual Opteron < $600
Red Hat also managed to boost revenue by persuading existing customers to expand the size of their contracts.
Which may or may not come out right in the long term.
I've been impressed by Red Hat's ability to consistently make money and perform well. They were one of the few profitable companies during the big .com bubble burst at the turn of the century, and it's good to see them repeat this success story.
For that reason, I think that Red Hat just won't be very appealing to a buyer who wants to interfere. I think the two most likely interested buyers would be squatters who just want a secure investment and therefore won't interfere or truly enlightened people who know the real power of a principled open-source support company.
I think they're likely to stay independent for some time, though, so long as they can stay under the radar of the government of the United Socialists of America.
When I go into work and have to work on the RHEL servers, I can mostly get yum and rpms to work for the server configuration that I want, but god damn if it isn't like pulling teeth.
Since you're getting paid for it, I suggest you should not be satisfied with "mostly". It just sounds like you blame RH for not doing your job right.
Do you suggest every sysadmin should take their favorite distro to work? Well, I like Gentoo.
Nothing wrong with that, I've seen places run well with Gentoo. But Ubuntu is no different then running a Debian shop and alot of company where or are debian shops. Red Hat is a great choice in many cases and learning it is a good thing. If only fo for the fact that the enterprise software industry standardizes on it. I'm an apt/dpkg fan but yum/rpm can handle itself fine. Now if someone would standardize /etc locations of config file, that be great.
Larry Ellison and Oracle are beginning to lust heavily over Red Hat...I fear most of the best parts of RH would get lost in the catacombs of Oracle and never see the light of day again... Sun seems to be busy playing coquette to IBM (although HP would be a better fit). Novell would be a logical choice and would (finally) promote some consolidation in the Linux realm. Apple already has an OS based on a (flamebait acknowledged) superior Unix derivative. I would instead look to Cisco or Dell. Cisco has no in-house OS (other than IOS of course) and with their recent entry into the server hardware market it would be a smart buy, although not necessarily for RH. Dell would be an ideal combination, as Michael Dell is already a Linux proponent, although of a slightly different flavor. Dell isn't as integrated as their main competitors and has no real software presence, however their close association with Redmond might be a giant monkey wrench. If Dell wanted to grow up and really play with the big boys (the ones who are left anyway), they would grow a pair and go bold. Who else has $4-6 Billion in cash lying around looking for more software presence...Adobe? Google?
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
And you're clearly not very familiar with long term strategy. Microsoft isn't making any money on their desktop installs either. Ask a few questions... how long has Red Hat been working at this? Now, how long has Canonical been working at it? Which one has more Momentum? Canonical is moving extremely fast and it's more important to look at where they have come from up to now to see where they are going. They're getting ready to blow past Red Hat and leave them in the dust. Why? Because they will own the Linux Desktop market in many ways (not 100% or even 50%, but the majority of Linux installs) and that will lead to the business side. Just wait and see.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
IBM doesn't support Debian-based distros on their servers.
Every version of Red Hat is LTS, not just every other like with Ubuntu.
Red Hat owns and has tons of expertise in JBoss, which is a benefit in the enterprise.
Red Hat support IBM Power chips, Intel Itanium2 and IBM Mainframes, though Ubuntu supports Sparc. Those SunFires tempt me...
Last year I finished a gig at a telco that deployed over 9,000 IBM Blade Servers all running Red Hat.
It works both ways. I cut my teeth on Red Hat, so RPM is second nature to me while Debian's dpkg and apt took some fumbling. I have Ubuntu-EEE at home but run either CentOS or RHEL on servers.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
1) Assuming by buyer you mean "end consumer":
Nobody asks, when they buy a copy of a board game, who invented the game or who made this copy. They worry about price, and how much enjoyment they will get out of it, and such. If they like chess more than Risk, they'll buy chess, even though nobody has a copyright on it. If you point out they could make their own chess set instead of buying one, they'll point out that they'd rather buy one than spend the time and effort, thanks. If they'd rather spend the time and effort, they'd have already started making their own.
So, go ask the buyers of Red Hat product what value they're getting. Buyers don't generally give a damn who did the work, as long as they're getting something they value for their money.
2) Assuming by "buyer" you mean "stock purchaser":
The reason for business is to make money, not to own technology. Since the buyer of the stock is interested in making money, he buys stock in companies that make money, and doesn't in companies that don't. He only cares about a company having unique technology insofar as the unique technology allows the company to make money. The same applies to every other feature of the company.
The reason to buy Red Hat, then, is that you expect Red Hat to make lots of money. The reason to not buy Sun is that you expect Sun will not. This applies whether you're buying just one share, or buying the whole company.
Very, very occasionally, a company with marketable technology will have utterly miserable, incompetent management. In those cases, there may be a realizable profit if you buy the mismanaged company or their technology and put new, competent people in charge. In general, this very rarely happens. Like pretty much anything, quality of management follows a bell-curve distribution, and you'll usually swap managers in the middle of the curve with experience for new managers in the middle of the curve who then have to learn new stuff.
It's even easier not post at all, here's your answer "it's open source, fix it yourself" :) But seriously, licensing costs are lumped into the total cost and no one cares how the software's developed. Companies pay for support, quality, and brand reputation. Red Hat has been able to compete in all three areas.
If RH produces their product for less than Microsoft they have a competitive advantage. It's not just Windows vs Linux, JBOSS is also doing well against IBM MQ.
Sun is a leading corporate contributor to solaris.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's not just Solaris.
According to this, in 2006, sun was the leading corporate contributor to open source projects that were in the Debian distro.
Here's another look at Sun's open source contributions.
Dual Opteron < $600
I agree.
The current bug party with screen garbage is absolutely UGLY, as well as being a security risk.
KDE's beta testing dropped the ball, because a bug this atrocious should not have made it past the testers.
Very good comeback.
I'm trying to aim for RHCT, and I'm failing terribly. That I blame on my own ability to learn.
Good for you for using Gentoo! I heard how difficult it is.
there is another reason to buy a company... if it's eating into your own market then you buy it so you can shut it down and strip out anything worth keeping thus preserving your own market.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The support is quite dodgy, really. I carry licenses for RHEL so I can get help with CENTOS via that licensed RedHat if I need it. I've done a lot of work with RedHat OSes in the past, and have used RedHat "EL" since 6.2EE when I was helping out with running OpenMail on Linux. I've had about 3 cases on my $2600 or so / year premium RedHat license and they never fixed anything in a timely fashion (if at all). I ended up fixing a problem with a module they load that crashed the machine by using install in modprobe.conf, there was a bug for crashdumps which "resolved itself", the case I filed was never resolved but some kernel that was 14 months newer finally fixed it magically, and I had a few problems with udev, etc. I'm so fed up with RedHat EL support I don't think I'll be buying another year, they are really the bottom of the barrel for one-off customers. You will get next to nothing for $2600/year IMHO.
Oh, when my subscription to the EL5 channel ran out on RHN, the case they never solved kept constantly emailing me but I could no longer log into support to close the case to have it stop emailing me all the time. Frustrating, and a lot of the service offering is "half assed" - you might think the same if you paid $2600 per year for something and get as little return on the scant number of bugs I filed cases for.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
I have to admit i've always been at a total loss as to why redhat could have the same sort of market cap as someone like Sun (at least pre-takeover rumours).
Ahahaha, RedHat has been ridiculously priced from day 1, but this guy is a 'troll' for asking a perfectly reasonable question.
To answer, Linux is perceived as a growth market, and Intel and others have invested a ton of money in RedHat to insure that they are in a strategically dominant position in the Linux ecosystem. There is only one organization that can coordinate changes on every level of the Linux stack, and that's RedHat.
However the actual value of that position in terms of revenue is still an open question.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
People like me install Fedora on their home desktop machine. I understand rpm/yum and all of the Red Hat specific configuration file locations. When I work on the Debian/Ubuntu servers, I can mostly get apt and dpks to work for the server configuration that I want, but science damn if it isn't like pulling teeth. Now that I have enough power, and I have to make a decision on which distro to get support from, do I go with something that I know (Centos and Red Hat) or something that is similiar yet foreign (Debian/Ubuntu)? The last 3 servers that I've been in control of have been ESX with CentOS VM's. Wow .... does that mean Debian and Canonical are dead-ends ?
in TFA there is no mention of Citigroup looking to buy Redhat; just a mention that a Citigroup stock analyst upgraded his target share price to $17 and kept the recommendation to "hold". ./ has gone and commented on how Oracle culture would be compared to Citigroup's whereas that's not even the point..
Once again everybody on
Sheesh people, the linked article is probably under 250 words. Could you not have given it a read? Did it not strike you as something strange that a bank would want to buy a software vendor?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Generally, I also prefer Ubuntu over RHEL/OEL, but Oracle database and WLS are not supported on Ubuntu.
Also, database did work for us on Ubuntu, but WLS had some strange problems, so we decided to switch our Oracle servers to OEL, and that works really good.
I think Oracle buying Redhat would be a good thing. I think it was quite amazing how quickly they merged BEA into their Fusion Middleware. Dropping your own app server in favor of another in a few months is not a small thing to do. Jdeveloper 11g TPs was still using what was supposed to be OC4J 11g...
They also don't drop existing brands. They'd probably call it Oracle RedHat linux and drop their own unbreakable linux. From an enterprise point of view, probably a good thing.
What I don't know is how is Oracle going to respond to IBM/Sun merger. Java is THE platform Oracle put all their strategy in. If somehow Java is not as open as it is any more, Oracle looses big time. So... how about Oracle buying Sun?
Would you ask the troll if it would like a dessort, or perhaps some coffee?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Big companies stagnate easily. I wouldn't want them to fall into that trap.
This Slashdot story was posted by a Slashdot editor who calls himself "Souls kill". The story was suggested to Slashdot by someone who calls himself "Head Dunce". A dunce is "a person regarded as stupid". (Please note, I'm not suggesting that the Slashdot editor "kills souls", he is suggesting that. I'm not calling the person who wrote the story a dunce, he is calling himself that.)
The Slashdot story links to an article in Forbes Magazine. Will Forbes and other "financial" publications continue to pretend to offer useful financial advice when they did NOTHING to stop the corruption of big U.S. banks taking on debt 20 to 60 times their assets?
The Forbes article was written by someone named "Ruthie".
The "takeover" talk appears to be completely fraud, in my opinion:
1) Citigroup is not thinking of buying Red Hat. Yes, the Slashdot story suggests that, but the stories to which Slashdot links don't suggest that.
2) Citigroup has been extraordinarily destructive; it helped cause the present job loss throughout the United States. The article implies that Citigroup has a lot of Red Hat stock and is trying to manipulate the price.
3) The Slashdot story links to a Reuters story that says, "Linux software maker Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) reported profit ahead of Street projections on Wednesday , helped by cost cuts and a stock buyback, sending shares up 8 percent." Someone is apparently manipulating the price of Red Hat stock, because "22 cents vs Street view 20 cents" is certainly not news that should cause people to value Red Hat stock so highly that the shares go up 8 per cent.
4) The Reuters story only says that some un-named people on "the Street" predicted something, and Red Hat did a tiny bit better. Remember that "the Street" is responsible for the present job loss throughout the United States. They are, in my opinion, vicious crooks, who stole from and are stealing from the taxpayers because corrupt politicians believe they are "too big to fail".
If you aren't a full time stock investor with plenty of inside information, you should not be buying stocks. Those with little experience just lost 40% of their money!
We deserve better leaders than "Souls kill", "Head Dunce", Forbes, Ruthie, Citigroup, "the Street", and politicians manipulated by those who don't know any better way to make money than by paying to corrupt their own government.
I can't imagine RedHat has any particular value to any existing software vendors. A hardware vendor might make sense, but it would have to be a huge one. Anyone outside of the IT industry would be insane to purchase RedHat.
Clearly it would be beneficial to get a hold of RedHat's patent portfolio.
Also it would make sense to acquire a competitor, though I'm not sure who that would be. Microsoft would encounter regulatory roadblocks, Sun is on the verge of being bought-out itself. IBM doesn't see RedHat as any kind of threat; and I don't think they make enough on Linux services to want to buy a Linux vendor solely as a hedge.
Oracle seems to be a natural choice. RedHat has been pushing it's database and application server stuff for a while as a cheaper alternative to Oracle. Like another poster said, it would be beneficial for Oracle to absorb RedHat to support it's database products and eliminate a competitor. But it's not as though Oracle would be in any type of position to capitalize on any of RedHat's other markets. And it's not as though RedHat is much of a threat to Oracle anyways, since their products are in completely different price-ranges.
It would be interesting to see a company like Cisco buy RedHat. They could marry a rack of servers with the Cisco logo with a pared-down, remote-terminal type RedHat desktop that would run on a company's existing desktop hardware, only with much higher security and easier management. No anti-virus needed. No more time-consuming desktop patch management. Higher performance, more flexibility, and the latest buzz-word, Linux! It would be an easy way to jump into the server, desktop, and cloud markets all at once. And it would be an easy sell in a down economy, to companies that are weary of upgrading to Vista. Merge the Windows server and Cisco network admins. Outsource to a hosted Exchange service if you really need that, otherwise run a basic cross-platform groupware service on your new Cisco servers. It could work.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
On the other hand, the folk who hang out on the CentOS forums are bunch of very helpful people.
My big problem with RedHat is that if some bureaucratic mishap (or malice) stops the payment of your RedHat subscription, you suddenly have a bunch of unpatchable insecure boxes. Sure, you can point yum at the CentOS repos, but if you're going to do that, why pay RedHat in the first place?
If i were Redhat I would be saying no to potential shoulder surfer owners looking to maximise profit without regard for the clientelle.
Debian can't be bought, it is not a company with shareholders. You would need to convince the Debian maintainers that they ought to be part of Oracle -- I know some of these guys, hell would freeze over first.
The most important of the above is the RH staff. If citigroup/... were to buy RH and do the ''wrong'' things the staff would simply decamp, create another company ('BlueBoot'), take a copy of all the source code (its all GPL remember) and the RH customers would follow the staff for their support.
Any clueful potential purchaser would realise the risk that what they bought could just evaporate.
Most companies care about having support available, but will never actually use it...
Because most of their customers never actually use it, the support is rather lousy.
The people making the purchasing decisions seem more concerned about being able to blame someone else if something goes wrong, rather than trying to minimize the risks of something going bad, and trying to mitigate the damage that could result.
Blaming someone else is not going to help the business.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
A good buyer for RedHat? I can't see one, because anyone big enough to buy that, imho, is not suitable to control it.
Any company some involved with computers/sw will have vested interests in steering it towards their own goals and in the towards damnation. Any company totally unrelated to computers would be in it for the money and we know how that story usually ends.
A good owner for RedHat? I'd say Torvalds or Cox, but I don't see either one on the potential buyers list...
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
There's your problem. Try a real language.
The parent Slashdot comment was posted by someone who calls themselves FuturePower (R), with the parenthesized 'R' suggesting a registered trademark.
So the comment author is a person who believes that a name chosen for a technology forum is a potential basis for self promotion and gain through civil lawsuits and has therefore allied themselves with the likes of the RIAA and MPIAA. That tends in the direction of causing me to have less confidence in her judgement.
Agreed! I fondly remember reading Alan Cox's blog in the 90s about his Linux work while on RH's payroll. He was fixing hard, non-sexy things.
Cheers Alan!
you did good so far, and beat expectations even in a global recession. that means you're doing it right.
there is no need to bring in additional executive board/shareholder meddling by getting bought.
keep what you are doing on your own.
Read radical news here
Well, in addition to your post's basic premise being a little over the top, you're completely wrong on your analysis of Thai: one syllable names show nothing. In fact, traditional Thais normally have relatively short names (e.g. Kao Klai, a K-1 fighter), yet they _still_ take nicknames. Thais generally use their nicknames, like "Nok," throughout their adult lives, even if they are movie stars or university professors. The use of the full given name is really rather rare unless it's used for identification purposes (i.e. in a news article).
Thais generally use repetition (lek lek), alliteration (sum sarm), or rhyming (reuay beuay) to create a diminutive, though these can also be used to create flowery language in an article, a song, or a poem.
Put identity in the browser.
Obviously the whole redhat/debian/ubuntu thing is not simple. Personally, I have ubuntu on developers desktops, debian on servers except for the annoying centos servers we inherited from a merger.
There a few things about the default centos/redhat setup that shit me enormously, such as an idiotic umask that allows group writable perms by default. Can anyone spell unable to ssh to host due ownership permissions for 40 points? Twonk who decided that idea needs drowning and resuscitation repeatedly until it no longer works.
Same deal with the clear in .logout. If I care whether people see what I have been doing I will hit ctrl-L. I don't need some nanny twaping the clear screen key just because some turkey has logged out as root.
Red hat is synonymous with annoying defaults these days.
Both cases are common. The desktop distributions (Ubuntu/Fedora) are used as entry points for learning how the system tools work. Developers and system admins become familiar with a particular distribution on their own desktop machine, and use the corresponding server distribution (Ubuntu LTS/RedHat EL) when they come to install a new server.
Like you, I use Fedora on my desktop and RedHat EL on my servers because that is what I'm familiar with. However, I am beginning to think it might be time to change to Ubuntu. The recent versions of Fedora (9, 10, 11) seem to be aimed at the home user and laptop market, and are becoming less relevant for a development system. I used to keep at least one machine updated with the latest Fedora release, so that I could keep track of the new features and learn how to use them. The last few Fedora releases (9, 10 and 11-alpha) have not been usable as servers, so all my machines have stayed at Fedora 8.
I am about the last one in our project team who does still use Fedora/RedHat, almost everyone else uses Ubuntu. In which case they will prefer Ubuntu LTS rather than RedHat EL when they come to install a live server, because that is what they are familiar with. As a result I have started to migrate many of my configuration scripts to use apt-get on Ubuntu rather than yum on Fedora.
So yes, there are still some of us who install Fedora on our desktop machines, and use RedHat EL on our servers. But there may be fewer of us in the future.
Come on guys, these are the same people who were smart asses thinking they could make massive returns with zero risk all because they thought they could model investments and economics around mathematical equations - ignoring the fact that economies are made up of people who are a mixture of rational and irrational motivations.
So please inform me, why should anyone listen to these boy wonders on this matter? I might as well ask my grandma on her views regarding the possibility of Oracle buying out Red Hat.
Well...
It seems youve never even seen any kind of support outside of sun and ibm I guess. Cause i tell you: there is no comparission at all.
FOSS bussiness people have a good take on corporate support AND we will actually provide it without you having to sign your soul to us, without you risking loosing any "warranties" because you touched a file.
NO SIG
This is how Citigroup is going to spend OUR bailout money.
Cue the lynch mob.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
What Red Hat ran into is not being profitable in a bad economy, but one of the dark sides of being a publicly traded company.
When Canonical does start to turn a profit, it doesn't have to worry about this issue because it is privately held.
Going public to me seems to be a double-edged sword. It is a smoke and mirror way to raise a lot of capital, but it also sets you up to have others come in and try and tell you what to do...and it could be someone that you don't really want telling you what to do (example: eBay buying shares in Craigslist).
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
When I work on the Debian/Ubuntu servers, I can mostly get apt and dpks to work for the server configuration that I want, but science damn if it isn't like pulling teeth
"apt-get install lighttpd", now you try :P
/me has spent several hours discovering that the centos netinstall makes you specify your own mirror as opposed to debian giving a list, and the official docs start with "to use netinstall, first download the complete installer CD and stick it on a webserver on your LAN". Then tried downloading the regular installer CD, to find that you need FOUR CDs for a minimal install with all options disabled, as opposed to debian's one. Then after giving up and downloading the DVDs, finally got it installed. Trying to install lighttpd... package does not exist, as opposed to debian packaging pretty much everything. Wanting to stab someone at this point, he downloads the lighttpd source code, notes that it uses scons as a build system. Tries to install scons... package does not exist. It requires four CDs for a minimal install... and doesn't include common packages. What. The. Fuck.
</evidence type="anecdotal">
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Its a tough certification: you hang in there though, its worth it all the way.
NO SIG
RedHat could defend itself against hostile takeover attempts by adopting some form of "Poison Pill". Such a device would render whatever makes Red Hat valuable have no value to a hostile bidder. An example would be what Peoplesoft did to thwart a takeover from Oracle. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_pill
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Lightweights! When I started using computers back in the 60's, we composed our flowery languages using toggle switches with lamps for feedback ... in Binary Coded Decimal and Machine Code! Now get off my lawn !
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Okay, rephrased: Thais who emphasize their one-syllable nicknames when they are adults are emphasizing, and intending to emphasize, their lack of responsibility.
Shutting down red hat wouldn't work. The developers would just start a "Blue Hat" company and start building a distribution called "sombrero".
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
Your post was stupid. That tends in the direction of causing me to have less confidence in your judgment.
I started out on RedHat back with 3.0.3, learned to build my own RPMs, etc etc, etc. I switched over my home machine to Ubuntu with Dapper, haven't looked back. I still grok RPM, but I also now grok apt & .DEB. Slight learning curve but once you have it down, fairly easy.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
A lot of people don't understand the value in support. Big companies do.
Do you fix your own car? You will save a lot of money if you do the work yourself.
Did you build your own home?
Time has value. If you LIKE working on cars then fixing your own is fun. If you LIKE building building your own home sounds great.
But for a company they make money doing x and a computer is just another tool. It is better to pay an expert than to do it yourself.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Not really. Moving from distro to distro really isn't that that hard. Ubuntu is really nice and Ubuntu server is gaining a lot of traction.
Red Hat is still very popular. If you want a JOB now I suggest that you install and learn Centos. While your at it learn Ubuntu as well.
The more you learn the better. Goodness knows we don't want to be like the people that think Mac OSX sucks just because it isn't Windows. Or that where so sure that Vista would rock.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually, Red Hat is the company working most actively on the Linux kernel. Source (scroll down to the "Who is Sponsoring the Work" paragraph).
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
It seems that this economy has inspired a lot of businesses to move to Linux
It's the economy folks. Businesses turning to Linux has nothing to do with the quality of Microsoft products.
I'm scared of your thoughts. There are already enough monopolies around that charge us extra for basic goods and services.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Sun was also a leading contributor to the lawsuit brought by SCO against IBM, and their customers.
There are a lot of reasons to choose Solaris over Linux but one of them for me is the community. These type of childish remarks get old quick. Seems Linux wants to be what Solaris was in the Unix OS space and what Microsoft was in the FUD space.
Dual Opteron < $600
While being profitable does raise the incentives to buy Redhat, being profitable also lowers the incentives to sell Redhat. On the flip side, it may make sense to sell if the buyer is more profitable, but then the buyer doesn't have as much incentive to acquire.
It's not a dark side. Even if Redhat does sell, it's because their shareholders wanted to sell. It's only going to happen if shareholders on both sides perceive a benefit.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
In a word, NetworkManager. But that is an over simplification.
I agree that a distros like Fedora with new versions of everything you expect bugs, and you have to accept some problems in return for all the latest features. However, the recent changes involving NetworkManager have broken many things 'just worked' for a standard server install. What makes it a problem is that there isn't a simple way to work around all of the side effects, and some of the responses to the bug reports seem to treat problems with large scale server installations as a low priority.
NetworkManager is aimed primarily at laptops and mobile systems which regularly connect and disconnect from different networks - and when it all works, I look forward to installing it on my own laptop. But for a server or desktop system that is wired to a fixed network, it causes a lot of extra problems and offers no real benefit.
But - as I said, you expect some problems when a new component is added. What is missing is an option at the start of the install sequence that asks :
It is worth noting that Ubuntu provide a separate download for a server install. The whole thing fits on a single 700M CD, and runs happily in a VM with 64M of memory.
I agree, and it has also been a good indicator of what to expect in future versions of RedHat EL.
Have you tried installing Fedora 10 without NetworkManager or BlueTooth ? On a laptop these make sense, but who in their right mind would want a room full of BlueTooth enabled servers ?
Yep - point taken, which is why I am learning how to make my scripts distro neutral. But, without a simple server install for Fedora, I think RedHat will be loosing out.
One of the reasons a stock goes up or down is because it beats or misses analyst estimates.
If a bunch of analysts estimate that company A will have a quarterly EPS of .20 and they come in with an EPS of .15, the stock price goes down.
If a bunch of analysts estimate that Company B will have a quarterly loss of .80 per share and the company comes in with a loss of only .70 per share, the stock price goes up.
Easy to manipulate.
I think it says more about the analysts than it does about the company.
Dual Opteron < $600
If you set aside the already mentioned IBM, Sun, and Oracle.. I suppose Hp could be considered.. You could throw in Dell too, but that would probably make people actually cry.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
As a old time jack-of-all-trades/sometimes DBA, I have been seeing Oracle sitting on its fat a** for quite some time, content to gouge customers with, by now, over-priced & over-engineered software. The vast majority of my colleagues (full-time DBAs and such) have been stating for just as long that Oracle support is not worth the price you pay for licensing. Larry & co. are now taking their market share for granted, like Novell & WordPerfect used to (to give two easy examples).
From where I stand, Oracle is basically giving the market away to M$. I used to laugh at the very notion of this, but too many recent events I cannot talk about (the joys of working for the MIBs... (ok, the suits are not all black, but you get the idea)) have lead me to this conclusion. I am not happy about this, but I can't deny it any more. Oracle should revise their pricing structure and the way their products work: we are no longer in the 1980s, Larry! What was acceptable then is not any more!
And, to make matters worse, Oracle has turned into the new CA (Computer Associates): too many software that was acquired by them have simply disappeared out of sight. Like 99.999% of what CA has bought, that used to be good sellers and had good visibility, but that disappeared overnight when CA got their slimy tentacles on it.
Finally, to add insult to injury, Oracle, like Sun, still does not grok what FLOSS is.
No, Oracle should not buy any Linux distro or anything resembling a Free *nix. In the case of Red Hat, that would be the absolute worst thing that has happened to them. It would be just as bad as if M$ would have bought them out.
Some time ago, it would have been an intriguing concept. Not any more.
"yum install `package`", now you try. Sigh... The point I was highlighting was a Fedora/RH user has the same issues using Debian as a Debian user would using Fedora/RH. Just because you prefer a certain way and are used to it, does not make you better. I've used Fanbuntu over the years and set it up fine and then say to myself, "What's the big fucking deal?". It acts just like my Fedora desktop. Granted, I know what I'm doing. There is a large section of Fantbuntu users though who do not have a clue, and then put their 2c worth in everywhere you go. My favourite..... "rpm is so crap compared apt-get"....it makes me want to cry. Where I work, the support boys use Ubuntu as their Linux "distro of the week", and, I shit you not, when I asked them to grep some logs for information, they did not know what I was talking about. To answer your concerns, (and the following is something that needs fixing and I hope they sort it out by version 6 of RHEL), you only need CD1 to do a minimal install. If you needed more, you did it wrong. No one's fault there but your own. (Hint: use google if you cannot figure it out..or ask me). Also, add the rpmforge repo to get the stuff you want.... scons, lighttpd, etc. You prefer Debian.... I prefer Red Hat. I'm cool with that. I'm cool with the fact Ubuntu introduces new stuff that was in the previous vesion of Fedora. But the thing I'm most cool with is that Big Enterpise..no...small, medium, and big Enterprise use Red Hat primarily. (From my experience). That way, I get to have a great paying job using an OS I love. When Debian/Ubuntu gets mindshare in the real world, I know I can switch without a problem because, at the end of the day, it's all Linux with the config files in a different spot.
Nobody asks, when they buy a copy of a board game, who invented the game or who made this copy. They worry about price, and how much enjoyment they will get out of it, and such. If they like chess more than Risk, they'll buy chess, even though nobody has a copyright on it. If you point out they could make their own chess set instead of buying one, they'll point out that they'd rather buy one than spend the time and effort, thanks. If they'd rather spend the time and effort, they'd have already started making their own.
The thing is there are loads of manufacturers of chess sets. If you are cheap you can buy whatever is cheapest. If you want something better you can ask friends for thier experiance with different brands, read reviews or whatever. OTOH if you want Risk there is only hasbro, take it or leave it (or possiblly make a pirate copy).
Both the retailers and the end users can easilly dump thier vendors if the quality of your chess sets goes down, the price goes up or the lead time gets worse. OTOH if the quality if hasbros risk sets goes down, the price goes up or the lead time gets worse people who want risk still have to keep getting it from hasbro (or pirating it but pirating a board game is a lot of work)
The same applies to linux and windows. If you want to carry on using linux (even redhat-like linux) but don't like redhat there are other options who will supply and support almost identicaly setups (or you could just download centos and forgo the support if you don't think you need it any more). If you want to keep using windows you have no choice but to keep buying from MS (or pirating it but pirating for a buisness is risky)
To put it another way Redhat's value is almost entirely in it's customer and employee goodwill. Both of those are things that are easilly lost in the SNAFUs that follow a typical merger.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I could rewrite your comment, only switching all positions. All my servers have CentOS. My desktops are Fedora Core or Mandriva. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop for some reason... using apt or just getting anything done is like pulling teeth. Apt's TUI was designed by someone who hates people.
To put it another way Redhat's value is almost entirely in it's customer and employee goodwill. Both of those are things that are easilly lost in the SNAFUs that follow a typical merger.
An excellent point, and a very good reason for people to avoid attempting a hostile takeover of the company.
Redhat once paid people to write crazy programs like Enlightenment. Then they focused on a little less crazy ideas like web servers. Now they'll take the next step & become even more boring. Wonder if anyone is still there from the glory days of 1997?
Shutting down red hat wouldn't work. The developers would just start a "Blue Hat" company and start building a distribution called "sombrero".
We'll that's teh rub, isn't it? What is to stop RH's staff from leaving after a buyout and starting a new company based on OSS? Does RH have enough proprietary add-ons to differentiate themselves?
Where is the value? The software or the development / support staff?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Ok, let me outline my argument for you. Suppose hypothetically, Ruthie is her name, not the diminutive of her name. Then how does calling her "Ruthie" signal that she doesn't want responsibility? Plus there's no obvious consensus that diminutive names signal desire to avoid responsibility.
That's a widely held perspective. Consider George W. Bush, for example. He called Russian President Vladimir Putin, "Putie-Poot". Putin smiled for the cameras, but the BBC called that an "act". The BBC writer said the nicknames were considered "a sign that parts of Dubya - his name for himself - never really grew up." "Putie" is the diminutive of Putin, and "Poot" is a childish word for defecate.
You must have a pile of Bush anecdotes, if you can pull one out so casually. I'll be glad when the shelf life on those things expire. Moving on, my take is that Bush has at times exhibited a remarkable recall for people: campaign contributors, staffers, fellow politicians, etc. I imagine that the childish names are how that works. And "Dubya" is his nickname in his family. It's not just something he calls himself. Moving on, Bush doesn't seem unusual compared to other US Presidents for dodging responsibility. There aren't many responsible presidents in the past hundred or so years, Maybe Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Ike Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Jimmy Carter. Three of those had popular diminutive names.
"The parent Slashdot comment was posted by someone who calls themselves FuturePower (R), with the parenthesized 'R' suggesting a registered trademark. "
Or a sitting Republican congressperson.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
So apt has the ability to download stuff quicker than yum...wow, that is impressive. I'll concede that yum checking its database for stuff is not as quick as apt but its not that big a deal I've found on CentOS. It's not that much slower. If you have issues, then perhaps its a PEBKAC problem. I call it Fanbuntu due to posts such as yours. Check you later, dickhead !
Daengbo, I have great respect for your opinion. You have spent more time in Thailand than I. You have spent more time teaching Thais English than I.
But I respectfully have a different opinion. I was always focusing intensely on cultural differences, even differences between Thais. In my classes, we often talked about cultural differences between Chinese-Thais and ethnic Thais, for example.
You don't seem to have that focus. Perhaps you didn't notice that, in my opinion, a childish sense of irresponsibility cripples the Thai culture. That is a problem throughout the world, of course. However, Thais, particularly Thai women, signal that sense of irresponsibility when, at a particular time, they choose to use their short nicknames. That choice doesn't always mean much in terms of action, but it is an indication of what the person is feeling at the time.
I've been an Oracle Apps DBA for 10+ years and a RHEL admin for about 5.
I have yet to have a single client move to Oracle Enterprise Linux and every client that has considered it decided against it for one reason - Oracle's Support sucks.
Sure, great, I'd get all my support in one place - (strike) India (/strike) Oracle. Unfortunately, that support is horrendous.
I had Oracle work one linux related issue for a client, as a top severity issue with Oracle. In short, Oracle took a week on it, missed fixing the critical issue, and didn't have an analyst available when they said they would (during a mission critical downtime to address the issue).
Sorry, no.
Just use the command-line jar program. You don't even need an IDE.
jar -cmf $manifestFile $jarName $sourceFiles
http://www.mhall119.com
This is highly misleading way of interpreting that data. Esp. given the caveats that lwn.net has to do just tracking the companies for linux kernel development. From what I can tell they unpacked all packages in Debian, and then assigned the "corporate contributor" ... so all of OpenOffice and user space NFS goes to Sun, even though they did little more than a code dump, 10 years ago, in the later case.
In general I'd hope that "the community" is not using Solaris now because they see through BS stats. like the above, and know that Sun are much less of a participant in the community than Red Hat. But then, given the free ride Canonical gets sometimes, I do worry that it is just a case of network effects working against Sun.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
The point I was highlighting was a Fedora/RH user has the same issues using Debian as a Debian user would using Fedora/RH
The point I was highlighting is that they don't -- a RH user trying debian won't need to add third party repositories to get common packages; a RH user trying debian won't need to write down the URL of a possible mirror on a bit of paper when using netinstall; a RH user trying debian won't find that the official netinstall docs say "step 1: download the full installation CD"; ...
you only need CD1 to do a minimal install. If you needed more, you did it wrong. No one's fault there but your own.
Got to the "what categories of things do you want to install" screen, unchecked "gnome", unchecked "kde", unchecked "virtualisation server", unchecked "blah blah blah". If I'm expected to go into the screen which lists every single package individually and uncheck them there too, that's just crazyness :P
(I would hope that this isn't the case for the desktop-oriented fedora, but as mentioned I'd been asked for centos specifically)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
In general I'd hope that "the community" is not using Solaris now because they see through BS stats
How are these BS stats? Sun didn't perform the study, the part about Sun was just a minor part of the study and I can't find any reference that they funded the study. OpenOffice.org is an important application. It was a proprietary product until Sun bought it and open sourced it. NFS hasn't had a major version release in about 10 years.
They also did quite a bit for Gnome and participate in other projects including X.org and Mozilla.
Sun participates in a lot of open source projects both their own and others. Don't know what you're talking about there. Unless you're talking about the Linux Kernel community which is just a small part of the open source community.
I'm not sure why so many people on the lkml have a bug up their ass when it comes to sun. Especially in recent years. In the past, I used to remember a lot of comments that would compare how something was done in Linux and Solaris. This was before Solaris source was made public. The reason it seems people were able to make those comparisons were because of information Sun freely published or that sun engineers shared.
While Sun hasn't been perfect, it is unfair to discount their contributions. What's going on with Harmony is unfortunate but we shouldn't forget all the other JSR's Apache was able to implement. Hopefully that gets resolved.
But I don't see it any different than some of the things RedHat does. I can't download RHEL for free and use it and get ISV support. I can get CentOS but I can't get ISV support for it.
Things can be hair when going from proprietary to open source and a couple of speed bumps shouldn't negate all of their substantial contributions.
I've been very happy switching to Solaris. Especially with java web apps where I've seen performance increase and memory usage decrease significantly.
Dual Opteron < $600
"yum install `package`", now you try. Sigh...
The point I was highlighting was a Fedora/RH user has the same issues using Debian as a Debian user would using Fedora/RH.
You prefer Debian.... I prefer Red Hat.
When Debian/Ubuntu gets mindshare in the real world, I know I can switch without a problem because, at the end of the day, it's all Linux with the config files in a different spot.
The problem with Fedora, as I recall, is that there's no officially sanctioned documentation on upgrading from Fedora version n to version n+1. Unless that changed? -Thufir
So the Forbes.com author Ruthie Ackerman is an adult who has chosen to continue using a childhood name, a name that suggests that she is small and cute. That tends in the direction of causing me to have less confidence in her judgment.
What an odd bias. Do you factor in her publisher?
Can any free Java IDE Just Work(tm) with making simple executable .jar files?
Did you spend one fucking second googling that? The problem, almost by definition, cannot be the JAR file as the JAR is designed to work with any JVM. So, why is your system not configured correctly? Ask a useful question.
Netbeans won't do it. It says it will generate a manifest with a main class but it dosen't.
By *default* when you create a "hello world" console app in NB it will create a JAR -- you're too dumb to even ask the right questions.
the manifest to point to the main class then Netbeans will magically ignore or overwrite it everytime. The internet forums tell me that it's my fault...
Yes, it's your fault. Did try a hello world console app first? then build from there? do you have more than one class with a "main"?
with ant scripts because I want to show my friends a hello world application without making my friends compile and run it themselves in their own IDE. Many of us have friends who don't know or care what an IDE is.
Oh, you're doing a hello world app. well, since there's just the one class I don't see how you can have the problems described.
The Matisse editor in Netbeans is powerful and full featured. I can tweek every little ass-hair of every little component. Wait - what's all that crap in my source editor? It dosen't look familiar, and to add insult to injury, Netbeans is telling me that I can't edit some code?
Did you try clicking on the widgets from matisse? That will allow you to edit the code completely. If there's a particular part of that which confuses you: use a mailing list. Idiot.