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ZD on Red Hat
Richard Finney
sent us a Lengthy article on
Red Hat. It's called 'Inside Red hat's Bunker'. There's
a trip to their offices, articles about growth and interviews
with Bob Young. Pretty impressive.
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I've been getting sick and tired of seeing all Linux growth articles focusing only on Red Hat. The article I just read states that 'nobody owns Linux,' but it's quite obvious that Red Hat is trying to snuff out other distributions. It sickens me when Linux newbies (or wanna-be's) assume that Red Hat *IS* Linux, and Linux *IS* Red Hat. Just like with Micro$oft, they know of no alternatives.
Plus, investors are throwing cash at Red Hat. They're not investing in Linux per se, but just Red Hat. Pretty soon, the other slick distros (which, coincidentally, ARE better than RH's distros) will be no more. Everything will be Red Hat.
I don't like that. While Red Hat may be a "cool" company in the sense of employee appearance, they're not cool in the fact that they're trying to clean up shop and horde Linux. It's happening, yet too many people don't realize it. It is a bad thing.
rpm -i --force --nodepends DamnIWishIWouldaGottenTheTarballInstead.rpm
Seems like an invalid comparison to me. RedHat gets used as both a server and a workstation, and they are comparing to NT Server and Unix Server shipments only.
Assuming that Microsoft's not lying, you can be pretty sure that almost every NT Server or Workstation licence shipped has been deployed or is going to be deployed shortly. You can't make the same assumption with Redhat CDs shipped.
I know people who purchased RedHat 5.1 and 5.2, apparently counting as two shipments in that graph. And, many people are just dinking around with RedHat, and are by no means using it as their production OS.
On the other hand, there's the huge number of CheapBytes CDs, FTP downloads, and other Linux Distros, so maybe it all evens out.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The graph for Linux shipments is quite amazing. It appears to be nearing the number of NT shipments quite fast. Perhaps it will overtake this year.
/ osship3.gif
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/graphics/library/9902
RedHat is the company that pushed alternate economic models into the spotlight. They'll always have my respect for that.
æeee!
As a former RH 5.2 user, I suggest FreeBSD. Its solid, easy to install, easy to upgrade (via CVSup) and the ports system is excellent.
Also, I find that the packages on the FreeBSD site are for quite recent versions of software.
I found most RH rpms were for outdated versions of the software - which means you end up not using rpm that much - which can make it a hassle at upgrade time.
I understand that you don't simply package up software for distribution as a package the first day it comes out, but most RH packages appeared to be six months off or more.