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Linux is Not Red Hat
Vox wrote in to send
us a link to a feature that appears over at Linux Today. The
article is called
Linux is not Red Hat
and describes the fears that a growing number of the old
school Linux users have been expressing lately. Specifically
it talks about MetroWorks deciding to only support Red Hat
for their CodeWarrior for Linux release.
Its been obvious (to me anyway) that redhat is just out to make linux into an operating system for the masses, while making a nice sum of money at the same time.
My opinion? if you want to be someone using a "different" os , use FreeBSD. I think we need a healty amount of different operating systems as main stream , so we never get another MS
We should not fear the presence of commercial software, but rather revel in it as it gives Open Source the opportunity to prove how much better it is. We do believe that, don't we?
If a commercial vendor shows up with some restrictive license or policy, is it their fault that our choice is restricted? Or is it our fault because we chose to whine and complain about it rather than provide a better alternative for ourselves? Freedom goes both ways, and they are free to support you or to leave you behind, just as you are free to buy their product or to come up with an alternative.
We have the choice. The GPL ensures that we will always have the choice. That doesn't mean that freedom will be handed to us on a silver platter. MetroWerks has just as much right to support a single distro as we have to support them all. We shouldn't restrict their freedom by enforcing our notion of freedom.
Lately, it seems that the Open Source notion of freedom is that everyone should be free to do only what we think they should do. We need to lose that attitude quickly, and start competing on the basis of our technical and philosophical superiority. Does it make any sense that we preach freedom and procede to rant that everyone should be restricted to the GPL?
Wake up, people! Stop whining and get to work! I've seen the enemy and the enemy is us.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Posted by Synsthe:
/. is an accurate representation of the Linux community as a whole, guess what folks, Linux is doomed.
I read everything I need to know about you in the first sentence or two == "I am not a Linux user."
End of story. Your opinion means shit.
It's people like you that are the biggest problems for the Linux community.
I'm just going to chime in here quick, I'm not a regular poster, but I read posts here quite often; that is, when it's possible to wade through all the trolls, and anonymous cowards with immature posts such as the above.
If
Did you even bother to read his post? He points out some very good, very good facts. He had the honesty and decency to point out he doesn't use Linux himself because it doesn't work for him. He deserves praise for that, not your kind of shit. He's got more balls than you'll ever have kiddo.
Put aside the fact that he uses windows for a moment and read what he said, and understand well what he said. The kind of mentality some people show around here is exactly why he is right, and exactly what people who want to see Linux fail, need. You're providing it for them with your elitist attitude.
Linux is not about usurping Microsoft's power and demolishing it as a valid marketable OS. If it was, Linux would be no better than MS itself, and all of you who would like to see it do as such, would be doing so in vain. You'd be creating exactly what you allegedly didn't like. I believe Linux is about providing alternatives to what is currently dominating the market. I think it's doing a good job of providing just that.
You, are taking all of that, and in one small post, supporting the exact opposite.
You're last line alone shows plainly you're without a clue. He wasn't defending the act, he was pointing out the fact that the reaction to it is an even more serious problem.
Throughout how many hundred posts here, I've seen one or two people provide possible solutions and courses of action that could be taken to rectify this situation with little or no backlash. Yet the rest of you just bitch and bitch, and make matters worse.
Wake up and smell the coffee, you people are going to be bigger problems for Linux than MetroWerks (sp?) and RedHat could ever be.
--
Mark Waterous (mark@revision3.com)
I have an Integrated Development Environment. It is named /bin/bash (grin).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by hurstdawg:
What is the _Real_ agreement between RedHat and Metrowerks...
and how long until the different distributions start becoming incompatible with each other... sure people could just port the apps over, but how long until some of the OS _isn't_ open source anymore...?
The FHS is there today, and a lot of vendors don't
follow it. Since all indications are that
LSB will encompass the FHS, I see no
reason why. Locations of XF86Config very from
dist to dist and there is no reason.
If LSB is not here yet, demand support for FHS.
It's a step in the right direction.
Before you say that a Debian-dominated world would be worse than a Red Hat-dominated world, remember that Debian is not a for-profit organization. Debian has no incentive to attempt lock-in, nor to release bug-ridden code to meet deadlines.
By the way, (and I'll admit tagging this on here so that my post will get read as well), The president of Metro Werks replied to the original article with a clarification of their position on RH linux, which is that "Metrowerks validated and QAed the first version of CodeWarrior for Linux GNU Edition against the RedHat distro. Metrowerks is also currently validating against other distros...", mentioning SUSE and Caldera as in process.
So while RH Linux is the only distro which they are supporting so far, the ultimately goal is to support all of the major distributions. So give MW credit and maybe even a pat on the back for taking the time to make sure their product works on each and every platform, one step at a time.
Bet they wish they'd made it clear that that's what they were doing earlier, however. :-)
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
First from Metrowerks president himself:
"Metrowerks validated and QAed the first version of CodeWarrior for Linux
GNU Edition against the RedHat distro. Metrowerks is also currently
validating against other distros such as SuSe and Caldera as additional
supported distros. Nothing in any of our agreements with RedHat preclude us
from validating and distributing against other distros, rather this is a
question of resource allocation to get the validation and distribution tasks
into gear.
We'll remedy this in the near future.
Best regards,
-GregG"
A thoughtful and sensible reply.
I think there is validity to a couple of the arguments here. It IS good that Red Hat and MetroWerks have collaborated to bring a valuable programming IDE to a great platform (Linux). As long as this is a positive FIRST step, and not a collusive agreement that would ultimately cause harm to the Linux Community in general and individual vendors in particular.
I believe it is our responsibility to simply and politely let Vendors and Distributors know that we are a part of a community and that we will support ONLY entities that are also "open" and supportive of the larger Community in which they exist.
If we just do this and strengthen the constuctive dialog among ourselves and our organizations we will win through as a community, rather than being reduced to isolated "customers" which many of us have revolted against.
Peace,
mowa
I'm guessing that CodeWarrior was developed with the libraries and such that Red Hat provides. Most likely, this includes stuff like glibc2.1, gtk+, and whatever Open Source goodies included in Red Hat that other distributions may or may not have.
Instead of saying CodeWarrior *only* works with Red Hat Linux, it would be better off saying something like the following:
Requirements:
- Linux distribution with glibc2.1, etc. (recommended for use with Red Hat Linux 6.0)
Something like that. That way, you can check the specs of your own Linux distribution and see if you have the requirements for running CodeWarrior.
A warning to a fragile community...
I want to talk a little bit about how dangerous and destructive articles like this are.
I AM NOT A LINUX USER, although I have dallied with running Linux on my machine on more than one occasion. I am one of the many x86 Windows users who has at one time or another installed and then uninstalled a Linux distribution. Over the last few years, I've bought two copies of Slackware and two copies of RedHat which translates in the grand Linux headcount to "four users" when in fact I represent zero (I have a single license for Windows 95, thereby contributing 1/4th the number to the Windows headcount that I contribute to Linux's). I don't use Linux for a relatively simple reason: it doesn't work for me. When I think about what I do with my computr I'm systematic.
I read email using Eudora, an excellent email program with a good interface that's easy to use and handles my email volume and have seamlessly integrated PGP. I read netnews using Free Agent from Forte, likewise an excellent program with a good interface. I browse the web with Netscape and Internet Explorer, with Netscape configured with images, Java and Javascript turned off and IE with all of them on so that I can choose "how" to browse just by choosing the tool to browse with. I play games -- lately, "Gruntz" and various arcade game emulators. Lastly, I program, with Cafe or Visual Studio. I primarily program graphics using DirectX and OpenGL.
For these tasks, Linux has little to offer me. Moving to Linux would mean giving up having a good email client, giving up having a good newsreader, giving up all hope of a stable, up-to-date, fast web browser, giving up my favorite games (MAME is available for Linux, but it's generally slower than the DOS and win32 versions), giving up all hope of having a good, rich IDE. Graphics? Give it up entirely. 3d support is practically non-existant on Linux and where it exists it's for last-generation hardware (at best) and poorly supported and even more poorly integrated into the overall system (Mesa on 3dfx is an unacceptable substitute, though perhaps this will change in the long term with some support coming from Matrox for the G200 and Nvidia).
I don't want to have to spend days or weeks getting the system "the way I like it" or even into a usable state (fvwm95 on RH4 was a great example of this: lots of icons pointing to programs that weren't installed, the worst possible GUI interface concept) and I don't want to have to rebuild my kernel just to get sound.
So Linux doesn't work for me and can't be made to work for now. I don't want to use a hacked together tcl/tk based email program where I can manually add a button for PGP and I don't want to have to pretend that EMACS is an acceptable substitute for an IDE with an excellent help system (CW Linux may suffice here, the other Linux alternatives simply don't -- documentation and context-sensitive documentation searches is 50% of making efficient use of an IDE). I like good interfaces and consider ease of use to be the primary reason to use a computer instead of a paper and pen.
Nevertheless, I take great interest in alternative operating systems like Linux and in the Linux community in general and sat the above mainly to illustrate that I'm an outsider by necessity. If the above changes, I'll move. I'd love to run a faster, more stable OS.
The point of this message is to give a warning. When I read articles like the one entitled "Linux is not Red Hat" I detect a strain of paranoia that is very familiar to me as a former Amiga user and this concerns me. It reveals that the Linux community is very fragile and that, if one desired, disrupting the commnity would be very easy. Since there are companies that would be served by such disruptions, and these companies are currently being motivated to improve their own products (some of which I use) largely due to Linux, I have a legitimate point of concern.
The Linux community, from the outside, seems distrustful and self-loathing. When a Linux company succeeds and tries to distinguish themselves (as Red Hat is doing), the Linux community tends to have discussions reminiscent of revultionaries questioning the loyalty of their leaders to a cause. This is very, very dangerous.
Consider how easy it would be to use Slashdot's anonymous coward posting to "dead agent" Linux.
"dead agent" --> fictional messages distributed within the ranks to inspire fear, confusion or terror. typical ideas are things like dropping leaflets on troops that you have good intelligence on telling them that you just bombed their families in town such-and-such into a burning oblivion and include what looks like xeroxes of newspaper reports about the tragedy [from papers familiar to the troops in question] along with a marked-up casualties & fatalities list (also looking copied/xeroxed). In the modern day, Scientologists use "dead agenting" to attack critics by spreading stories about their critics social lives, etc.
I offer the following four fictional messages. Imagine if they were posted by employees or agents of companies that would benefit
THE FOLLOWING ARE TOTALLY FALSE!
First, start the havoc with something like:
>>
There's a much larger issue at stake with CW. A friend of mine who I will not name used to work on the backend for CW MacOS. He said that on numerous occasions he came across code that was obviously cut and pasted from GPL'd code from GNU (especially gcc and no I am not talking about flex/bison generated parser stuff [which they don't use, btw] or other exempt stuff) or stuff that had obviously started that way and been modified. Whenever he brought it up the manager squashed it ("it's public domain") or said that it wasn't their problem (since it was in a different part of the product). He was warned pretty severely not to make an issue of it and told that if he wanted to talk licenses, legal would be happy to explain to him all sorts of things.
I shrugged off this knowledge because CW was strictly Mac&Windows and Open Source is mostly lipservice in that segment. I'm a linux user, I don't care. I know that sounds lazy, but that's how it is. But to have it happening on Linux and nobody willing or able to do anything about it is a horrifying thought. If we don't defend GPL, it becomes meaningless, but who wants to get involved in a suit with a big ISV (who can afford it?). They (and others) are seeking to drive a wedge between free software and open source.
>see bottom>
Add on another message as a reply:
>>
Not surprising AT ALL. I heard something similar to this from a buddy of mine who worked at RedHat before he got sick of the place and decided to move on. He said that GPL abuse was considered a non-issue at RedHat in any context involving improving their relations with commercial ISVs. RedHat was talking about putting together engineer-consultants whose job was going to be to go into commercial ISVs and do nothing but get those ISVs onto Linux and Red Hat Linux specifically (if possible). Management even had a term for it -- "fair game" -- that they'd use as a sort of code when referring to focusing ISVs on RHL instead of general Linux. Helping ISVs by throwing code at them was SOP and since the engineers were Linux geeks a lot of the code that went out was modified GPL'd code with the license removed that presumably ends up in products. I think they were working with Metrowerks, too...
Same buddy said that he'd had enough of working for a commercial company that claimed they were interested in "open source" and "free software." He couldn't take the hypocrites at every turn.
>see bottom>
That would be more than enough to start a firestorm, but smart players know how to win. Add another post along the lines of:
>>
No surprise. GPL is dead if commercial people feel they can ignore it. They'll use whatever resources they can for the least amoutn possible == free! How can we stop this? A boycott would be a start but isn't enough.
>see bottom>
The purpose of the above post would be to silence people who would panic -- they see someone else panicing and instead of downplaying the problem or trying to calm people down, they move to the attack. To solidify this (and add feelings of general hopelessness by brining up a well financed and well staffed enemy), you add a fourth message:
>>
Ho could you prove it, anyway? Suppose that Metrowerks memset (for example, I have no idea) was ripped off. How could you prove it?... someone should crawl through the C runtime source that MS provides with VC++, too...
>see bottom>
And that'd do it. Firestorm.
In this case, the target (Metrowerks) would be burned pretty thoroughly by nothing more than four contrived posts and the use of anti-RedHat paranoia. More than one company has a good reason to burn companies that are considering supporting Linux commercially. They might like to make a few examples as warnings to others.
You can bet that certain companies would call up Metrowerks (if the above posts & resulting firestorm were reality) and say, "Gee, sorry you're having so much trouble there -- isn't it strange that you never have those kind of PR problems on a platform like ours? They're such kooks, god, you have our sympathy working with them. They're probably just using it as an excuse to steal your software, anyway."
Think about who would gain from such practices. Think about the paranoia and conspiracy-minded aspects of the community they'd be using to get there.
Articles like this one (RH != Linux) make these kinds of destructive tactics MORE POSSIBLE.
I think what I'm trying to say here, folks, is that you need to relax a little. If Metrowerks thinks that they can gain by supporting other Linux platforms, they'll support more. If they think that you're just going to bitch and moan or propose totally absurd alternatives (like having volunteers port it "for free!" to other Linux versions), you frustrate and annoy the people who ARE trying to work with you, make others who are considering it rule you out, and fester a virulent strain of paranoia and hostility that could be used (as demonstrated above) to destabilize the community a whole.
In other words, LIGHTEN UP.
RSR
*QUOTED ARTICLES ABOVE AND ALL OF THEIR CONTENTS WERE TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. THEY WERE EXAMPLES OF THE KIND OF DESTRUCTIVE PROPAGANDA THAT ***COULD*** BE WRITTEN. (I feel obligated to say this again or people will read the above and not read the context and just freak...)
I apologize if this has been said before ... @#$% MSIE 3 can't handle rendering the discussion quite right, and its poorly implemented smooth-scrolling is bloody slow on my p133...yuck....
... well, you might hack it into place with Slack or Debian, but good luck to you.
/. depends on a Beer- (not Speech-) licensed SQL database. It'll take some work before the Free community can deliver truly excellent server side applications.
:).
No one ever guaranteed that Linux was proof against commercial applications, Anything Free, and we can port it. Doesn't matter if the original developer only has eyes for one distro, if it's free the work can be done.
But MetroWerks CodeWarriorisn't Free. It's commercial, and if all they give out is an RPM that makes all kinds of assumptions about how your system is set up
On the other hand, CodeWarrior has nothing in the compiler end (everyone knows that). Just that a lot of people like their IDE.
Well, I have a new concept for Linux:
We don't need to be scared of any luser inferface
It's really an idea that's been mentioned before: UI's a fundamentally not a cutting edge thing. They require careful planning and execution, but no massive technology breakthroughs. Hence Gtk+ and Qt, massively superior in flexibility and power to M$'s MFC. In fact the last really good UI I saw on Windoze was DevStudio, which is all custom widgets anyhow.
The point is, we don't need their frikkin' IDE. We can write our own better ones. And our own better spreadsheets, word processors, desktops, and everything else. Miguel and the crew wrote all of GNOME in a year. These things can be developed fast, and with spread out
The only applications that IMHO can deliver real value to Linux are big-iron server-side things that require heavy-duty technology and years of experience (and millions of $$ of screw-ups and mistakes) to get right. Oracle. Lotus Notes.
We can compete in some of these areas, but I'm often less than impressed with Apache or the ftpd's in terms of efficiency and robustness. Take a positive example, CODA, the long awaited high-tech replacement for NFS. It's good. Very good. But it's taken a lot of development, significant resources of CMU, and it's still not quite done. Even our beloved
But even so, these are not the kinds of applications that will Balkanize the distros. They depend on more fundamental, standard services of the OS. They've run on other Unices and the effort to making them cross-Linux is miniscule next to the effort of bringing them in from Solaris or HP-UX or AIX (or worse
In conclusion, CodeWarrior sucks. Go support you favorite GPL'd IDE today!
This RedHat backlash has me bemused...and amused.
I became involved with Linux when I was in the Navy in San Diego in 1994. At that point, Slackware was the dominant distribution, a very narrow range of hardware was supported and a 486 was as powerful a processor as you might ever need.
At that time, OS/2 was the big threat to Microsoft because it was a "better Windows than Windows." Nobody gave Linux a second, third or fourth thought. And there were no rabid Linux enthusiasts, trying to find ways to promote that operating system as a replacement for Microsoft's.
Five years is a long time in the computer world. It's like dog years, I suppose. In that time, fantastic things have happened with Linux, developments that can certainly be attributed to the advocacy of legions of vocal Linux supporters.
Linux has been something like a stepchild that craves attention. It can do so many things very well, and other things competently. We all know the strengths and weaknesses of the operating system. But Windows has been the family favorite and that's tough to swallow.
But lately, something has changed. Linux is becoming more accepted. And that's what we want, right? Well? Isn't that what we want?
Finally, a Linux distribution has gained enough respect and understanding to be the subject of an IPO. The operating system gets more positive media attention than any other. And most of that attention is being paid to the one distribution whose publishers do the most to market: RedHat.
So all of a sudden, RedHat is the Microsoft of Linux. Just because they've achieved significant media attention. Well, so what?
The problem that I see here is one of expectations. You wanted Linux to become a mainstream operating system, but you wanted it to remain open and free. You wanted corporations to embrace Linux over Windows, but you wanted it to remain unencumbered by corporate marketing.
You wanted the same Linux that you've always had to remain the same, even though the short history of the computing industry shows that corporations will not accept software that does not have some sort of traditional means of support and distribution.
You can't have it both ways. Linux will remain a hobbyist's toy and a specialist's tool if it must continue with its established paradigm. But if you want Linux to compete with Windows, then somebody has to adopt the characteristics of Microsoft. The industry reacts poorly to wholesale change, so for Linux to triumph, its advocates must select the best aspects of Microsoft's methods and apply those.
All assuming, of course, that what you really want from Linux is a Microsoft killer.
Since RedHat is almost totally open source, and Codewarrior is not, I think the blame for this exclusionary packaging lies squarely on MetroWorks. Their claims of not being able to support 39 distributions insipres absolutely no confidence in me. There is no way in hell I would pay for a product that is so poorly supported that its open source competitors look good in comparison.
Can you right click a function or any word in emacs and have netscape search all your documentation for that keyword?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
And can you have it open up a tree based code browser, and browse the call stack of your code without running it?
There are lots of cool things IDE's do that you find very useful in large projects, or in projects that you're thrown into to try and maintain.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Linux is just a kernel.
Distributions are MORE than an OS.
We need to strictly support LSB and
specify and use the components of LSB and linux
that we'd like to call the OPERATING SYSTEM.
or... use FreeBSD.
Even if it could, it won't. According to the latest issue of Linux Journal, which had a feature on different distributions' stances on the LSB, Red Hat seems to be more in favor of complete compliance than most. Also, a Debian rep in the article said that Red Hat had been working with them since before LSB to ensure binary compatibility between the distributions. Also, I'm pretty sure that Red Hat has stated that it will be following Debian's lead standards-wise. Red Hat knows that so many of the people in the Linux community have their eyes on them that the company doesn't dare to do anything wrong. And with tools like rpm 2cpio and Alien, and with RPM being completely open and based on cpio, the packaging system is irrelevant. It looks like just a brain-damaged move on Metrowerk's part. And off the top of my head, I can think of five or six major distributions, and except for Slackware, they all seem like they work pretty well together. Makes me wonder if they were including Tom's RTBT and Trinux in their list of 39 distributions :).
Actually, Windows installers like to downgrade this and other system DLLs also as well as upgrade them. They also change the time-date stamps on the files so often you don't know what you have or why. Chalk it up to Microsoft letting the ISVs and their own app division put out the service packs for them. (And OS stability suffering for it.)
Linux has it's own form of library hell, as the Codewarrior support example seems to verify, but I'm sure that someone will figure out what 50 things to manually upgrade to get CW running on their slackware box.
I would imagine that installers that automatically prompt you to upgrade your libs are coming. There's no way to create a modern (ie, not Motif or monolithic) Linux app that can easily run on all distributions without it.
However, the only way to avoid a Windows-like DLL jumble in this scenario is a dependancy database that dead on accurate. This sounds like it means deb and not rpm, so maybe redhat should just get over it and adopt deb.
Anyway it shows that Linux has a way to go in certain places, if only because nobody really knows how to package a commercial application for it. Too many more Netscapes, Star Offices, and WordPerfects are definately bad news if you are interested in commercial adoption.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If I have XXX distribution and need to install something that comes in .rpm format, why not just install RPM? I've even installed RPM on my FreeBSD box! The dependencies won't work but a simple '--nodeps' takes care of that. Also there is a utility called 'rpm2cpio' which converts rpms to cpio archives. I've never used it but it should make it possible to install RPM packages without RPM.
Indeed, I agree, accusations and FUD is being tossed around by some people who see any sort of commercial success as the qualifying characteristic to "be the next microsoft". Some people are behaving irrationally because Redhat is doing well. And those people are incorrect.
However, just because you toss out the argument they make does not mean you should toss the platform. The point of this person's article is to show a specific instance of business behaviour that is _not_ good for linux as a whole. People should not hate microsoft because of its success, or its wide coverage of the market. That would be akin to saying that anything everyone likes should be considered evil.
Microsoft has earned the contempt of nerds everywhere for their anti-competitive business practices and outright immoral behaviour. Contracts that are not about promoting their solution, but negating the efforts of others, explicitly and with harmful intent.
This article, whether you agree with it or not, is speculating on the possiblity that Redhat has acted in that same way, making an exclusive contract to shut out the other distro's. And if a company, any company, begins to use those kind of tactics, we should object strongly. Even if some small no-name distribution with minimal circulation began to form contracts like that we would be obligated to set forth these objections. You can't hate Redhat bacause they are successful. That's fine. But if they begin the cycle of bad business and anticompetitive bahaviour, then we should object. Strongly.
Now, for the record, I don't think that Redhat can really do too much to the linux I love. It's open and out there, andI will always be able to use the version I want because I can make it into that image. But some vanity, some impulse inside makes me want to share that same ideal distribution with everyone, to give people a real alternative. And I would hate to see the Redhat dist become the version that people use because it has only replaced Microsoft as tyrant, without understanding the loving work that has gone into the philosophical changes that linux is made of.
"Without the law, there is no freedom. Without justice there is no law."
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
I think you one of the few people that hit the nail on the head here. They are trying to sell a product (an IDE) to people who historically haven't seen much or any need for such a product, no has shown much inclination towards spending money or using non-open source products. There's a really chance that Codewarrior/Linux could bomb big time.
Furthermore, they are trying to sell to a 'community' that has agreed to disagree about any standard beyond by-the-book POSIX. Now that the product's done, your number one problem is providing support for your customers. The problem is that your customers could be running almost anything under the sun in any possible manner.
So it's a no brainer to limit your support initially to the most recent revision of the most popular distribution. They might go bankrupt otherwise. On the other hand, if the product takes off, and their phone jockeys get up to speed, supporting other distributions is the smart thing to do.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Bringing Windows-style computing to Linux has risks. Most people who use Linux right now probably use it because they like the way it works, not because they don't have access to Windows. But what if people start writing more and more "free" Linux software that relies on some components on the CodeWarrier IDE? What if people stop developing egcs because CodeWarrior Professional is cheap enough and most users are happy enough with it? Commercial software may displace some free software, and in the process, some of the alternative computing paradigms Linux represents might disappear.
Also, the result of bringing Windows-style computing to Linux may well be that Linux gets a lot of Windows-style users. Is that good? On the one hand, it means that a large number of users finally work on a Linux-based platform, a platform with decent APIs (POSIX, CORBA, etc.). On the other hand, it likely means that the ratio of users to open source developers gets even more skewed, and that will push the free community support models to their limits.
The second question of whether it matters that this is tied to a particular distribution doesn't seem that serious to me. In fact, I would find it kind of useful if RedHat became the Linux for ex-Windows-users and, say, Debian became the choice for the traditional Linux community. That would make it much easier to distinguish users when it comes to bug reports. RedHat may become the AOL of Linux distributions, and that's just fine with me.
Yes.
/.ers treat the REST of the OpenSource world as non-existant.
You.
When you ask for software to be ported, do you ask for Linux?
Or do you ask for the software to be ported to OpenSource OSes?
Do you ask for the port to be done to Linux? Or do the port such that it works with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and even SCO. All these OSes are willing to INCLUDE Linux emulation. They seem to believe in a rising tide can lift many boats.
All you have to do is meet the rest of the OpenSource world 1/2 way.
When People ask about Linux point out there is a whole BODY of working OpenSource solutions. And even some commerical solutions(SCO, Solaris and no shocker if Apple makes a Linux PPC/*BSD option). When people ask about Linux, determine if they are asking about Linux or OpenSource OSes. And frankly, most of the vocal
So *RIGHT NOW* you are reaping what you have planted. If you are un-willing to DEMAND of vendors that their products work with *BSD, SCO, Solaris, then you deserve the bitter fruit out of a red hat.
Many good programmers use and like IDE's, especially those who develop and maintain commercial apps.
The main reason so many Unix programmers dislike IDE's is that Unix (with X Windows, gcc, gdb and an editor) IS a terrific IDE.