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Red Hat Commentary on ABC
Vamphyri writes
"An ABC News correspondent
says the ``Linux market will, as promised, now be dominated
by RedHat's commercial success.'' which he goes on to say
is a good thing. The full story is here but
way down at bottom of page. " It actually offers one quite
interesting comment: Red Hat netted 10 million last year, and
devoted 20% of that to R&D. The IPO will raise almost $100M.
If they continue that trend, they will put $20M into Linux,
GNOME, and more. Interesting.
You can talk about ACs all you want but at leat 2 of the spam generator/companies I know of will not be getting my email address off of this site :) They come here all the time and collect email addresses for building spam databases for mass email.
So blow on that haha
Some questions...
How do you have the X sessions configured? 1024 MB ram gives you over 20 MB per client, that should be more than plenty based on my experience.
Are the NT servers running the same basic hardware config as the linux servers (CPU, mem, # of network cards etc.?) How about on the clients? This was not very clear.
Basing system perfromance on the number of processes spawned is totaly pointless.
How were the tests performed? Were all 100 clients connected at once? Does this accurately reflect real-world activity? (In defense of terminal server, it should be mentioned that X is a much bulkier protocol than the RDP used on terminal server. This assumes you are not using the compressed X protocol, I forget it's name...)
the guy asks if the linux community will accept RedHat's contributions to the source if they're making money for it... is this guy daft? they [the modifications] would be judged and accepted or denied the same way they always have been --- by their merit!
Yeah, whatever.
The general linux community seems to have sub-optimal support for some higher end, or least more expensive, equipment. If they start pushing development to support those machines, e.g. 8 processor Xeons, they are probably going to be lonely contributors in that area.
iow, the "merit" you put forth is nothing more than better support for hardware that the community has not really gotten their hands onto. *That* is a good thing. In fact, given some of the slams RH has gotten from the community, if the community starts rejecting those code modifications without good justification, I'll be seeing if the community has something up their sleeve.
This is not a given among intellectually honest people.
We are discussing the value of a specific article. The article contains major errors in logic and substance. His reputation in your eyes will no more cure that problem than Shockley's admirable technological achievements validated his racism.
Thanks for validating my objection to Anderson's clueless comments. It is odd that you present your concession as a rebuttal, but perhaps you didn't realize what you were doing.
Anderson says that the "open source freaks" were wrong to assume that support was a moneymaker for Red Hat. I say it was. You say the same thing.
Care to sit down and think through your argument again?
I notice you didn't have any problem with your colleague dumping on "open source freaks"...or if you did, you allowed your partisanship to override your honesty. For shame.
Anderson's crude baiting of the open-source community on the shakiest of grounds was an oafish act. It was inept, stupid, and wrong. Anderson is, therefore, an oaf.
If you want to elevate the debate, you can either:
Good luck with your decision.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
AFAIK Transmeta is working with hardware, not software. (IMHO Open Source is not applicable to hardware)
Well, some of that money would be well spent developing an OPEN DVD standard -- something which could be to DVD what mp3 is to the RIAA. Hardware vendors of DVD decoding products are prevented from giving us specs to write drivers for their product by the DVD consortium. DVD, alas, is NOT an open standard, but unfurtunately this hasn't really slowed down its adoption in the home electronics industry. Maybe in the computer industry we could come up with a better alternative that is open...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Or might the original post meant that people like to eat at times, and this isn't afforded by OSS?
Duh
You are implying the premise that the 'whole Linux movement' is of utmost importance. It is not (to me). Not even a open source model that is profitable. What is important is that there is a free open source technologically up to date operating system on which I can do what I wish. Since an oversized for-profit public company is by definition stock holder driven, I do not want to invest my work on standards (gnome, etc) they push. The best contribution to the 'state of the OS' is now only in their best interest through the indirect relation that it may be the most profitable route. I would rather support an organization (Debian for instance) with whom there is no financial motives. My 'heuristic' is not blind (like phases of the moon). I do base my distro selection on intellectual reasoning. The reason i got into redhat in the first place was they were the only solid glibc distro (5.1) at the time. At this time my heuristic kicks in as a factor and Debian comes out on top through my decision making process.
Just because my original post was terse, do not assume my thinking is small as well.
This guy, like many, fails to understand that you're not buying linux when you buy a box of Red Hat Linux in a store. You're paying for the box, a user's manual, and a month of tech support. He doesn't seem to understand that Red Hat is required by law to make their software, and their source code, free, which they do on the net. I wish they had an email I could reply to him on...
I can't speak to the other points you made, since I never used NT Terminal server, but I can say that your comparasin of # of processes means nothing. Unix tends to use a large number of smaller processes and NT tends to use a small number of larger processes. This evolved this way because the overhead for making a new process in Unix is smaller than it is in NT. An NT programer might choose to start a thread as opposed to a process for one of two reasons: 1 - It makes sense for the design of what he's doing, or 2 - To attain acceptable performance, even if it is a confusing design. The Unix programer doesn't have the 2nd incentive since in most Unixen creating processes and creating threads take about the same amount of time.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Please back up your assertion that *.rpm predates *.deb.
(The rest of your post seems concerned with GUIs such as GNOME.)
I'd welcome comments about my story on Red Hat in this week's US News. Please keep in mind that the article is written for the broadest of audiences. Thanks, Russ http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/990621/21red.ht m
Even in the glorious days of their move to glibc. Why would invetsment and an IPO change the basis for their success -- that they have established themselves as the most innovative and complete distro?
Your "heuristic" is really an emotional problem: fear and envy of success.
No it can't. It cannot bind 4 NICs to create one fat pipe.
The main gist of my point was not 'really' about the desktop at all...components are meant to be much more pervasive than that.
However, as far as the desktop goes, I am not against their development as an optional 'feature'. For example, an gnome capable app able to receive a dragged icon is fine. A gnome dependent app (cannot compile or run w/o) is what I dont like. If I have to add gnome, or even worse, add gnome AND enlightenment, just to run a decent spreadsheet, I assert we have gone down a wrong path.
Open Source implies that there is source code. How can you have source code to a piece of hardware?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Even though this is somewhat counter to my original post I agree with this thinking. It is effectively built on the same logic as mine, just tempered. This is good.
I will just add, as someone on some other thread said, that a fork of some major codebase is another bad to watch out for. A fork combined with market share effectively steals the revision control. This is the kind of thing the existance of share holders may promote.
How does Redhat plan to continue growing with their only source of revenue coming from boxed sales? We're all aware that anyone can burn a Redhat and sell it themselves (ala Cheapbytes). This doesn't sound like a solid business plan to me.
Perhaps they will branch out and start developing allocations with their IPO windfall. That seems to be the grunge work that people haven't been willing to for Linux so far. Then, a question arises, will the Linux bigots shoot Redhat down for selling both an OS and applications, like Microsoft does?
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
Of course the answer to this seems obvious to us - but this shows a worrying problem: the open-source community is perceived in the media as some kind of stubborn, obsessive, pedantic group of people spoiling for arguments.
I'm not saying that the open-source community (or whatever else you want to label it) is those things, and I'm not trying to attract flames. My point is that there is a damaging perception out there, and whatever the cause, it is an issue we will need to face if we want to give the corporate world a positive impression of the work the open-source community does.
Andrew.
its not about the market.
now that i think about it, everything can be sold.
christianity, sex, fascism, communism, hatred,
love, honesty, dishonesty, murder, rape, justice,
equality,,,,,
there is a market for everything and theres someone
who is gonna try to cash in on it. so now i think that free programs
have to stand up against redhat et al just as much as they have to stand up against microsoft/intel
I hate to be incindiary but you strike me as a great example of someone who thinks he knows much more than he really does. What you don't seem to understand about Gnome is that it is intended to be flexible enough to encompass a number of paradigms. CORBA is just one part of Gnome.
The rest of what you say is mostly FUD...I haven't had Gnome lock up in months...Enlightenment and Gnome work very nicely together. Don't get me wrong, there are improvements to be done but things are improving. If more people like you would stop complaining about problems with Gnome and start working on them most of the problems would be gone by now.
As it is you are doing nobody any good at all...thanks for nothing.
> Linux market will, as promised, now be
> dominated by RedHat's commercial success.
Here in Germany for example, 9 out of 10
computershops and bookstores that carry
computerbooks sell SUSE Linux but one has to search for long to find a Red Hat Linux.
If somebody says Linux Market, this is valid
for all the world. USA is just one single
country. Ignoring other regions of the
world in this thread would lead to
a wrong analysis of the actual situation.
I assume Red Hat could have been a commercial
success in Germany but this is not the
actual situation.
I guess out of 100 Linux/*BSD that are sold
in Germany, >90 are SUSE Linux. This is
domination - in Germany at least, I do not
know the US.
I do not made this stats on sale numbers,
I just walk along computer shops and
booksellers or Computer-Mail-Order pages.
I could also say that in Germany >90
shops out of 100 offer SUSE and only
a couple shops do offer Red Hat or
other Linux/*BSD Distributions
I would make the same estimation for
free copies. If for example OpenBSD people
say that they share on a noncommercial
base, the number of these people is
1:XXXX compared with people that share
SUSE Linux.
At least this is my point of view, which
could be the result of the fact that Red
Hat 6.0 is not using commercial distribution
channels in Germany.
As I understand it, most public companies usually only allow 10-30% of their stock to be traded publicly, the rest is held internally by executives and employees (ie, stock options w/salaries). Personally, I'm not worried about someone doing a hostile takeover, or shareholders having that much influence. The folks at Redhat are likely to be much smarter than that.
I'm certainly not advocating this, but suppose...
that in some point in the future, Redhat or another
distro became some unruly beast out to crush all
other linux companies -- if it were possible to
create an opensource license, that EXCLUDED certain _specific_ parties?
I.E. a GPL modified with language that excluded
Redhat from including the software as part of their standard distribution.
Again, I dont advocate this -- I'm just wondering
if it's legally possible.
I've asked this question before, but previously,
I was asking if you could exclude specific open source projects or even specific persons from integrating your code into their
projects. (Say, if there were two "rival" groups
creating a software solution to some Linux need, and you didnt want the other group stealing your stuff -- or you fealt that their solution was techincally incorrect, or that they'd misuse it,
go commercial, etc.)
that I have been saying around here at the office for some time. However, I think the problem is deeper than just pushing Gnome over some possible better desktop environment. I think an integrated desktop environment in inherently non-UNIX in spirit and implementation. The gains are usually cosmetic in practice and not much better than an X cut buffer in theory. My take on why this is drives my take on the problem even deeper.
:) ) but usually is just a playground for typical programmers to make a mess. Another bad assumption is that critical mass of any standard will be reached. Another assumption is that components will be reliable enough for large scale reuse. This is just a simple exercise in probablility. All components have to be near zero fault. This will NOT happen. If they are not zero fault they must not be black box so they can be repaired (or at least faults traced). Now they are just code containers, in which case the language independence become a horrid liability instead of asset. PLUS the language independence effectively comes at the cost of needing another language, whatever a component models IDL or equivalent is. So it is not language independent after all...just the worst of both worlds.
Components, even CORBA components, do more harm than good. They are sort of like communism, looks good in theory but sucks in practice. It is due to the same reason too, invalid assumptions. The basis for components is built on many broken assumptions. The worst is the assumption that typical programmers will even go up the learning curve of components properly. C++ had this same problem, most C++ code I see is awful. C++ has the potential to embody great things (it does for me
As As RedHat increases in size and in the money they have at stake, a lot of us will seek out somebody smaller. It is how we work. We are not business people. We dont necessarily have time to research the details of a company's situation. We often just follow heuristics...in this case 'be wary of big company'.
I feel sorry for you. You decided to be closed minded. "Ooo, big company...therefore must be bad. QED." Maybe we should call this the "Yes, crawl under your rock and quake in fear" attitude.
Maybe you are right. But you seem very unwilling to possibly help or even try to change that trend and rather confirmist in throwing your hands up and walking away. Individuals in our country do this all the time and the lobbiests and interest groups love them for it.
You can look at the IPO as evil--RH joining the rounds of bigger business and thereby it *must* adopt big business practices.
Or you can look at the IPO as an opportunity to buy a part of the company and making sure RH keeps a steady course of abiding by the GPL, putting out good products, etc. I personally am surprised that a group of geeks haven't bonded together to form an organization with an end of buying a decent percentage of available stock and in turn be recognzied as an organizing representing individuals who care about RH's influence in the linux community.
You don't have to be a business person. You just need to give a damn and put some energy into it. Lots of people see RH's time in the spotlight as a bad thing and they bicker. Some of this is justifiable. Some of it is not and they are wasting opportunities.
Maybe I just need to brush up on my group theory reading.
"If their shareholders force them down that road, they'll just be making a mistake. Red Hat will loose revenue, and another distribution who has remained true to the open source model, will emerge as the top distribution."
Whereas I agree with your thought, I wonder how long it would take for another distrubution to rise to dominate. Chances are it would take some time - several years would be my guess.
... I can see is if Red Hat were to some reason
go under, the media would immediately call
Linux DOA.
The media has a nack for making illogical and/or
unwarranted connections, and this could be
another case.
However, that would be like saying if Ford went
out of business that all cars were destined
for failure... hmm.
That's the impression I got by the author saying
that RedHat would "dominated by RedHat's success".
It could also be linked with its failure.
P.S. - I'm not saying RedHat will fail. I'm a
6.0 user, and love what they're doing for Linux.
--- witty signature
Point taken. But since we're talking hypotheticals, humor me a bit longer. Now lets say RH does become the sandard Linux distribution for businesses. Now if RH integrates their own proprietary software into it's product (under pressure from its shareholders) then we might have a problem on our hands. I am inclined, however, to think this scenario unlikely as the GPL does seem strong enough to prevent RH (or anyone for that matter, not to pick too heavily on Redhat) from taking over Linux even if it does take over the Linux business market.
Linux will survive as a free alternative OS even if a forked non-free version does become the standard in the business world, after all most of us use it for reasons other than that it is the standard OS (which, of course it isn't yet). It would be a shame to see things turn this ugly, I'm hoping they won't.
dave
Depending on your definitions, of course.
For example, Debian doesn't classify mySQL as "open" because the mySQL license contains restrictions for use under windows, even though use in a unix environment is unrestricted. The same logic would apply to restrictions on which distribution your code could be run on.
Why not? Not trying to be mean or anything, just wondering.
Actually, I'm more of a superfreak :)
Posted by Mike@ABC:
First off, yeah, I work for the same site, so of course I'm going to defend Mark. But even if I didn't work for ABC, Mark's crystal ball is one of the better ones in this unpredictable biz.
People buying Linux WILL buy RedHat over the $1.99 version, and I'll tell you why: RedHat's customers are major corporations, and they want the support that comes with paying $80. Sure, YOU can go download it for free, but as Linux gets adopted into the mainstream IT market, you can bet that IT managers will pay RedHat for the support. Sure, it's questionable whether RH will make its main bucks off of support, but it makes IT people happier to pay for it. So much the better for everyone.
And calling someone an oaf isn't exactly elevating the debate to the next level, now is it?
> Your "heuristic" is really an emotional problem:
> fear and envy of success
Yes, my heuristic is effectively a fear of success. Not envy. Not emotional. Just experience. Actually, success is too ambiguous of a term since I am successful (in my opinion) but not rich. It is a fear of money based on experience. In a capitalist economy, fine, that is how things work, but in a gift economy I prefer to support a non capitalist organization. To me the beauty of open source is the gift based economy.
yes but competition among many distros of essentially the same OS isn't going to help much if the foundation of the OS isn't so good. I'd rather see several unique OS's competing against each other.
---
Sure, as Rob points out, Redhat HAS contributed a large amount of money to various projects. But what projects? Who gets to decide? Why does Redhat get to be the open source 'pope' that gives it's blessings to one project over another?
Look at it this way: Redhat makes a killing in it's IPO. It suddenly has even more money to throw at projects. Why should Gnome (Redhat's showcase Open Source project) get big support while something like WindowMaker languishes? Redhat is suddenly in the position to direct a lot of attention to one project over another. Suddenly the Linux community has a beacon that shines light on one portion of the open source world, and not another.
Maybe it's not 'planned' for it to be this way..I'm not saying it's a conspiracy of any kind. But Redhat obviously has it's own agenda. They are going to fund the projects that they like, and not fund other projects. This is something new we haven't seen before and I don't think this is going to be good. Should any startup projects now woo for Redhat's favour? Previously the various projects out there 'competed' on merit...the best man won. Now, thanks to Redhat's high profile, this has all changed.
Ok, sure. Let's say some die-hard open source project has no need for Redhat's cash. But what about Redhat's attention? What if Redhat decides to hype one project they favour over another? It's already happened and look at the controvercy (I'm not naming names). One word of praise or dislike from Redhat and minds get changed.
Redhat is already in the unique position to make or break open source projects on the go out there. I'm not confident they will wield this power wisely.
"Don't like what they wrote? Fix it! Take their source and make a better version."
Something to remember is that many people on this website can, but a very small percentage of the rest of the world can just rewrite software they don't like. I suspect that people who REALLY know what they are doing are in fairly short supply.
Posted by Mary CW:
Now, now...we're not all that slow. (Well, some of us are.) It's just that we have other priorities. Come on, folks, there are lots of people in the world who don't have the time or interest to look into every fad (tech or otherwise) that goes around. It's a workable sorting mechanism to ignore things until they've hung around long enough to prove that they have a lifespan longer than a mayfly.
There are clued corp types that have been reserving judgment on linux as a corp infrastructure, for good reasons...fortunately, many of the events of the past year have helped immeasureably in building acceptability in the corp sector.
So be happy, things are looking up...although as the posts on this Redhat article show, there are plenty of people who will be upset once linux is well accepted in the corp world, to counterbalance the people who are upset because it isn't accepted...
Mark Anderson seems to have a severely limited understanding of the business model that RedHat operates under.
Did they make money off boxed sales? Sure!
Guess what. The releases from RedHat are SERVICES.
What? Services? How do you figure?
You could go with Slackware and/or assemble 99.999% of what you find in a RedHat distribution on your own.
RedHat provides the pre-packaging of the distribution for you (that's the point of a distribution). Guess what. That makes it a service. Yes they value-added some things. But the majority of the code under RH Linux was provided by countless unpaid programmers for the betterment of the operating system as a whole.
They're no different from Walnut Creek in selling their CD's of the CDROM.com archive. They merely provided packaging.
The childish "Take that you open-source freaks" was the mark of a man who has little better to do with his time than come up with witty, inane (not to mention one-sided) one liners. Sort of like when a person rehashes an argument they lost, saying all the things the wish they'd had the backbone to say in-person.
It's disappointing that a so-called journalist has to sink to such infantile practice as this to try to cover for his deficient comprehension of the issue.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
if they fork the standard base then they probably won't follow the LSB and that will fall in this category but you are right to point this out.
This is also the great strenght of Linux over *BSD on the political/practical plan.
First we are sure that the only way to take Linux into a proprietary OS is to fight the GPL in court (their can be proprietary code on top of the OS but the main parts are open source).
Second the GPL license seem to prevent code forking more efficiently than the BSD license. Ok their was the Emacs/XEmacs fork and the GCC/EGCS fork (which resolved gracefully BTW) but these seems to be exception.
Maybe the BSD forks are exception too (don't know enough about them) but they are more profound. People are fearing that Linux will split up in many incompatible version but we already have FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and BSD/OS. They are 3 different OSes, not three different distros (although they must have a good part of code in common still). I suppose the compatibility between them is pretty good at least on the source level but they still are different as would 3 Linux-derived OS be different.
This may also be an argument against this kind of fear. If *BSD though different are compatible enough because they are open source then this is more likely to happen to Linux if he split (althoug if Linux split it would be more of a result of commercial pressures and may make it harder to maintain a good level of compatibility).
Ok, much more long that what I thought (and less constructed, as usual
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Yes the servers had the exact same configurations. The only difference is that the Linux boxes were unable to utilize the 4 Ethernet cards. All X sessions were opened one after another with about a 2 second delay between each client that was starting. That was due to our help not running around the room fast enough to hit the enter key after typing username/password. It took fire minutes for all 50 PCs running Linux to bring up the X desktop running RedHat 6.0. The other 50 PCs running NT Workstation were activated in the same manner. It took about 30 seconds for all of them to have the full desktop brought up. The Linux servers' performance is not acceptable but the NT logins were.
I started out with Caldera OpenLinux Lite, considered RedHat briefly, and installed Debian instead...Personally, I like it. I however, didn't like the part of the article that said that RedHat is now a viable business solution. Sure, it installs really easily (as does Caldera), but if a business really wants to use Linux, I suggest a lot of security measures (maybe even more so than Windows). Linux CAN be a powerful workstation, but it takes a lot of work to make it so--RedHat's easy install can't prevent your data from swaying in the breeze. In the business world, compromised data can cost businesses dearly. With all the hoopla about RedHat being easy to install, many people are saying it's for bussinesses, but no attention is paid to the security side of it, in which any generic install of ANY linux distribution is usually unsecure.
--
One of the things that people often forget is that the GPL doesn't oblige anybody to distribute anything, merely that if they *do* distribute something they must also make the source code available (such as saying "go to this webpage"). That's all.
I don't get this guy. He makes it sound like Redhat is going to take control of linux because they have investments from Dell, IBM, and the like. And what's this "new software business model"? I doubt that many changes from redhat would be rejected, considering they are often good, and are GPLed.
$20,000,000 is a lot of cash - I wonder if how they would use it?
More inhouse staff or perhaps funding remote access specialist hardware - eg a 4 way Xeon server with 1Gb of main memory and 4 network cards?
Just as a random selection *grin*
Tom
This will be a red-hot IPO, and the Linux market will, as promised, now be dominated by RedHat's commercial success.
I could be mistaken, but doesn't this line seem to imply that linux depends on Red Hat and that linux is nothing without red hat? I think red hat has and will do good things for linux, but linux existed before red hat and I believe it will exist after it too.
*sigh* Yet another daft article by someone who thinks that the GPL means Free Beer instead of Free Speech. Is it really such a complicated concept that no journalist is capable of understanding it?!
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
A guaranteed %-of-revenue RnD spending would make me start buying Redhat CDs from RedHat (as opposed to from LSL). Just imagine the value of $20M of GPLd development each year!
Redhat is cool.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
doesn't seem to realize that anyone could start their own company selling redhat CDs along with support/books or whatever and compete directly with red hat using their own product against them. Besides Corel is a major player in the commercial side of linux and they've decided to use debian.
They are contributing a large amount of money to the well desrved individuals that make Linux what it is!
he makes some odd comments.
first he berates people who think redhat will make it's money from support, but then suggests redhat will need to diversify from just box sales. i agree with the last part, but their box sales *do* include support, and what is he suggesting they diversify to? i'm thinking support...
as for the open-source community taking the development efforts of $20 million in gpl'ed code... well gee, let's give that tough problem a long think. have to get back to that one.
what i find *more* interesting is that redhat isn't just going against the conventional wisdom, it's exacting cruel and unusual punishment against the conventional wisdom.
cw: linux companies will just take and not give back.
reality: redhat gives back with a 20% r&d budget.
cw: in order to do well companies must protect i.p..
reality: all of redhat's code is gpl'ed.
cw: if a company *did* give back and it's code *was* gpl'ed (yeah, right) the free s/w community would love them.
reality: a vocal group (big? small? who knows.) continually speak against them.
cw: product companies must lose gobs of cash first.
reality: redhat's lost less then half a million since it's inception.
cw: it won't work.
reality: it's growing.
at this point the cw just rings up the aclu and requests legal assistance.
btw, the answer to the tough question: if it doesn't suck, yes.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
What happens when all these shareholders begin pressuring RH to adopt "better" business techniques which might go against the spirit of GNU/Linux? For instance, what if RH proprietary software begins to creep in and become integral to the distribution? This might seem unlikely in the present, but if the shareholders see more money in proprietary solutions (and ultimately RH will be accountable to its shareholders NOT the GNU/Linux public) then it might be an inevitable outcome.
Of course, RH might set limits as to how much control others might be able to gain over the company. Let's hope so.
dave
It is built onto many of us to have increasing
paranoia and resistance to big companies. As As RedHat increases in size and in the money they have at stake, a lot of us will seek out somebody smaller. It is how we work. We are not business people. We dont necessarily have time to research the details of a company's situation. We often just follow heuristics...in this case 'be wary of big company'.
RedHat has not really done anything to offend me yet, but due to size and money alone, my next upgrade is going to be Debian.
Wow, he seems to have coined a term that could end this whole hacker/cracker problem. Since we are no longer hackers (media has made sure that word is negative), we can now all offically be called "open-source freaks".
Finkployd
but what worried me more was the subheading immediately above the linux story, telling that the cellular industry had finally admitted that cell phones cause brain cancer. how disturbing... for one, my roommate just signed up for cellular service, and two, what will happen to scully and mulder?
Slashdot users tend not to understand it, believing every thing should be handed to them.
Does RH plan to control >= 51% of it's stock? I think that issuing more than that to the public could cause issues (as posted above) regarding company direction and control.
RH has a wonderful opportunity to raise funds for itself and to further the linux community through investment and exposure. It would be a shame to see Llib Setag in some position of authority, simply because he bough a gazillion shares.
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
I work for a Fortune 100 company and we did our owne in house benchmarks on VT vs. Linux and that's why we now are 100% NT+NTworkstation.
Which company? I want to know so I don't invest in any stock you might have. You've got the computer equivalent of a mono-agricultural farm. Can't solve something and have to upgrade to Win2000? Ooops. That open up other problems? Oops. Had to upgrade your hardware? Oops.
We discovered that being able to put 2 100Mbit eathernet cards in each Workstation and 4 on the server gave us several times the performace that the Linux server (by the wasy was twice as powerfull in CPU Mhz than the NT server ) gave us.
What's your name? Gotta know it so I don't end up making a mistake and hiring you since you don't seem to have considered any other free (and even commercial) unix. I don't like people with arrogant, one-dimensional, "I implemented it and hence I'm right" attitude. Bad team player.
Who knows one day this may change but until then I don't see us switching any time soon.
Neither do I.
And since our network is firewalled ( FW-1 ) then we don't have any security problems to worry about. Not even Viruses cuz they are stoped at the Firewall.
Uhhh....yeah. Right. I love people like you. You screw up, people like me get called it, we get to paid.
Please, give me at least then name of the company. I think I'm going to have some free cash when RH's stock shoots up to invest in some less volatile, slow growing companies. I want to be sure you're not on my list (and if it were, bad me, I need to do more research).
A group (in this case, a company) who can make definitive and correct press releases about Linux -- new updates, new features, FUD corrections, etc.
I'm tired of having FUD come out, people bitch about it, and the media running the piece doesn't get a correction update about where they were wrong.
> You don't have to be a business person.
> You just need to give a damn and put some
> energy into it.
But that is just it. Open source for me is an environment that has grown and serves the purpose of not having to expend unnecessary energy on non technical issues. The heuristic method he mentions is what has worked in the past and is what will continue to drive geekly decisions. Actually, I think the point above was that this nature of geeks will limit the size and profitability of Red Hat. I am not sure he is promoting or defending said nature, he may be just pointing it out.
> Why anyone would want to use an OS that can't do
> something as simple as bind 4-8 eathernet cards
> together to create one fat pipe is beond me.
Why anyone would want to use an OS that doesn't quite seem to quite "get" large portions of the TCP/IP spec is beyond me.
But yeah, binding the ethernet cards to the same IP like that is a nice feature. Although I find myself wondering how that works without severely mangling ARP/RARP...
[ nitpick: there's no 'a' in "ethernet" ]
> In NT you can do that in under 10 mouse clicks.
> Ahahahaha No waite 7 mouse clicks.
If this is such a large site, you've got some kind of automated setup procedure for these servers and workstations, right? I can't imagine having to walk around to each and every machine and execute 10 or 7 or even 5 mouse clicks...
[ nitpick: wait is spelled W-A-I-T, and you're missing some punctuation ]
> I work for a Fortune 100 company and we did our
> owne in house benchmarks on VT vs. Linux and
> that's why we now are 100% NT+NTworkstation. We
> discovered that being able to put 2 100Mbit
> eathernet cards in each Workstation and 4 on the
> server gave us several times the performace that
> the Linux server (by the wasy was twice as
> powerfull in CPU Mhz than the NT server ) gave
> us.
I won't ask what you people are doing that requires this kind of bandwith, since you're obviously only concerned with peak throughput...
...but let me get this straight: in a situation where the main bottleneck is network I/O, you're deriding Linux networking because of performance comparisons between a Linux server with one NIC, and an NT server with four?
I trust you are aware that you can take advantage of multiple network interfaces even without binding them to the same IP? (and in fact you can get some additional advantages there, if you're clever about switched ethernet and routing)
Also, you _did_ use the same client configuarations for both tests, didn't you?
[ nitpick: no 'e' in "own". and there's no 'a' in "ethernet" ]
> And since our network is firewalled ( FW-1 )
> then we don't have any security problems to
> worry about. Not even Viruses cuz they are
> stoped at the Firewall.
I assume you mean proxy+firewall, not just firewall. I sincerely hope that you're not in any way responsible for security at your site; this is an extremely naive attitude.
Firewalls don't magically make your network secure by themselves (yes, they _help_, but...). Crackers like networks with a hard candy shell and a soft, gooey center. You want to be giving the bastards jawbreakers to suck on instead. Preferably jalapeno flavor.
[ nitpick: the plural of Virus is Virii. I'll overlook the informal "cuz". "stopped" has two p's. ]
[ self-nitpick: I'm missing the accents in naive and jalapeno ]
It's a good thing you didn't reveal what corporation you work for; your post does not exactly scream professionalism.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
Losing 130,000 is really very good. That isn't all that much money, when you look at the revenue growth mentioned in the article. Even if it is way-inflated, it still puts them in the black in not very much time.
-ponty
Damn... you mean if I write some GPL'd code, I'm bound by the GPL to reveal all details of every aspect of my professional life? This thing really is a strong license...
Duh.
You have pointed out one thing that has worried me also, that Redhat may have too much power over linux. I'm not talking power as in control, like MS has over windows, but power as in influnence, which RedHat have without doubt.
I would be very concerned that project may be cometing on marketing, not on merit. Even between two projects where Redhat has no interest, whichever one is distributed with RedHat gets more exposure, and how many "official rollouts" will specify "no third party (non-redhat signed) software) ?
Remember, infulence is like money in the bank, the less you use it, the more you have. With Redhat releasing everything (currently) under the GPL, and going public, that's a lot of influence piling up. What happens if they every try to cash in on that account?
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
Am I the only one that loved the original Outpost.com ads (tatooing babies,etc) and hate the new ones (obscure monster movie nonsense).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Posted by Forward The Light Brigade:
er no...
linux can utilize 4+ eth cards, you just need
to give it a boot-time parameter that you have them
check the Ethernet-HOWTO
and I am not surprised it took a while to have the 50 clients set up when there was 1/4 the available net bandwidth...
One thing I believe should be improved is the instalation process and image. Not that I dont think it was a snap (it was); but a comment from a coworker was "This seaworthy screen instalation is supposed to attract people?" Hmmm. True enough. The instalation lacks the flashy graphics, and explanations that are customary in a WinX box.
And even though I love my command line, the mainstream wishes for instant GUI... its what they expect and eventually will receive. Just a cosmetic face lift on installation and 'bootup' and thats all that would be needed.
-Mishrak
You know your a geek, if you have more computers than cars.
I haven't seen many starving OSS hackers lately. ;-) OSS is a hobby, obviously you need a day job... preferably one that lets you work on your hobby during work hours.
- That making money is anti-opensource.
- He seems to believe that the fact that Redhat sells a box in stores prevents people from downloading the release for free.
- That the following two sets of people are identical sets:
In the words of the immortal Bugs, "What a Maroon!".- { people who told him Redhat will only make money from support and services }
- { Opensource advocates }
(There is certainly much overlap in those sets, in fact the first set might be entirely contained within second. But they are not the same set, and thus proving the first set of people wrong does not prove the second set wrong.)Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Well, this is another article guaranteed to generate alot of "Red Hat != Linux" flaming from purists and fans of other distros.
However, the author correctly recognizes that Linux is becoming a success in the commercial/corporate world, and Red Hat's business activity is largely responsible for bringing Linux to the attention of the typical clueless pointy-haired corporate computer-illiterate weasel who has, interestingly enough, been put in charge of making decisions regarding OS deployment.
This recognition is a GOOD THING!
Those above-mentioned "pointy-hairs" are getting it, that every line of software on the planet WAS NOT written by Microsoft.
And Red Hat has done much to foster this education of the masses.
I read lots of flaming about the quality of Red Hat's contributions to the software environment that makes up Linux. I would remind those doing such flaming that every single character of code written by Red Hat has been released under the GPL. Don't like what they wrote? Fix it! Take their source and make a better version. This is what the GPL is all about. Software by the people and for the people.
I'm thrilled at Red Hat's success, because it represents the success of a company who seems to have genuinely embraced the open source model of doing things.
All in all, I think this was a good, concise little blurb reporting the state of things at Red Hat.
Next question: if RedHat put $20 million into R&D on Linux, would the Linux community accept these source code modifications? The result would be a new software business model.
"...a new software business model."
Damn straight! and about time.
well... he does say "Linux market" not "Linux." and I think he means corporate desktop OS, not home desktop OS. at least I do not consider myself a part of the "Linux market" because I am just not looking for more applications to buy. And I run Debian 24-7 at school. As a home user, I use Netscape, X11amp, emacs, tex/dvips, gcc, and xeyes. 8) I may buy CivCTP but nevertheless I am more of a Linux zealot who tells his friends they should install and use Linux than a market for corporations.
RedHat is definitely a leader in the "market" part of Linux. Not "THE" leader, but "A" leader. I tried to introduce linux somewhereas, and I gave them a choice of RedHat and Debian. 9 out of 10 users who wanted Linux chose RedHat to be installed on their boxes, because it seemed nicer (RH5.2 vs Deb2.0).
However, this guy does not realize that RedHat also invests into more of the market, not us, mere mortal linux zealots. I cannot see myself jumping to use GNOME that much (except gnomine), just because my system is stable and easy enough without it. I have struggled for over 2 years, but now I am comfortable doing everything I want withough a flashy window manager. FVWM2 without themes is just fine. Same goes for most linux users I know. GNOME and KDE have the drag and drop feature which I'd like to have sometimes but mostly in Office-like applications which ARE market applications. Those are not the same as what I use at home. They wouldn't be even if I used WordPerfect to type up my papers.
Let me correct myself before you flame my post, RedHat also invests into X and the kernel (by employing Alan Cox, etc). I respect that. I am happy that they are ethical enough to donate money towards something that they get for free (the kernel). Thus it is a good thing. After all, I wouldn't want the kernel I run to be done by Linus if he was sweating over his keyboard for 12 hours a day programming a database, like I do, and then going home to release patches. The kernel is a FULL-TIME JOB, and people SHOULD get paid for it. RedHat is nice enough to make that happen. Debian is just not able to do that since they themselves live on donations.
As long as RedHat realizes they must support Linux to make money on Linux market, everything should be fine. No matter what journalists like this one say. RedHat dominates the shelves in the Linux section of CompUSA, but not the heart of developers out there. And RedHat directors are fine with it because they make money thanks to those developers.
That is really big of them. Most corporations, like a certain one whose name will be Microsoft, try to force developers into their own paradigm of the OS market. That is just wrong, and I believe will fail as a business model in a decade or so. That is if we survive the Y2K bug! 8)
Later,
Misha.
P.S. I am not an expert, I am a student. Reply with constructive criticism, not flames. I am not writing this for the outrageous name-calling.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
The article says they netted ($130,000). that is, they had a net loss.
They grossed $10Mil, and ended up losing $130,000 dollars.
If Open Source is so lucrative, Why is it that Linus not only can't reveal the source he is working on, but can't even talk about what it is he does?
The majority of this money raised will probably go to the marketing of redhat. While it has been getting a lot of press, I rarely see it anywhere in a mainstream magazine. Don't be surprised soon if you open up your newsweek and there is an article for redhat.
I personally think all this is great. I doubt redhat though will make a 20 mil contribution to research though. They'll probably make a sizeable contribution, but not that much. Would you, when there are so many people out there doing redhat research? If I'm wrong and they do put in a lot of money it may go to new software that they CAN sell.
Mark Anderson makes several claims in his article, and by my reckoning he gets them all dead wrong.
First, he asserts that the market success of Red Hat's $80 boxed distribution implies that their revenue comes from software rather than sales. This is difficult to justify in view of the fact that the same software is sold for $1.99 by Cheapbytes. The difference between the boxed set and the Cheapbytes disk is some rather unhelpful manuals -- and support. Anderson's own evidence gives him the lie.
He also asserts that Red Hat funding Linux development would be "a new software business model". I disbelieve. Red Hat's success is the validation of the very theory that Anderson professes to hate: the open source business model.
Tahe that, Anderson, you closed-source oaf.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
This guy is right about good network performance under NT and NT workstation. Our data center servers are NT Terminal server and NT server 4.0 and the servers have 6 NICs and the NT workstations have 4. We did a test with Linux using the best supported Ethernet card we could find for Linux (Intel Ethernet express pro 100 PCI) and tested the remote XDM login display against the NT terminal servers remote display on 50 PCs that have the same exact configurations. The 50 PCs that were pulling up the NT Terminal servers desktop, had completely loaded the desktop on all PCs within 30 seconds and the other 50 PCs that were pulling up the X desktop from the Linux box took almost 5 minutes. The process list ( ps -aux ) on the Linux box must have been a mile long and had used up every bit of the 1024MB or RAM and was swapping to disk. NT Terminal servers threaded environment only took about half that much memory and about 0.25 the amount of processes in the process list ( ctrl+alt+del )
--
There's nothing wrong with selecting Debian (or Caldera or S.U.s.E. or Red Hat or TurboLinux or...) but do so based on at least a little intellectual reasoning.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, "People who think and act like this should go back to the dark side where they belong."
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
So don't give an email address at all. Or spamblock it. Or make one up. Or install procmail. I've never believed in inconviencing anybody else just so the spammers have one less address in their lists.
Seriously, if they were real people, their IQ wouldn't be much higher than that of the average middle-aged McDonald's employee. Sure, they deal with deep ET issues and all that, but the content displayed by the on X-files have been dumbed down to the level of your average talk show :)
People buying Linux WILL buy RedHat over the $1.99 version, and I'll tell you why: RedHat's customers are major corporations, and they want the support that comes with paying $80. Sure, YOU can go download it for free, but as Linux gets adopted into the mainstream IT market, you can bet that IT managers will pay RedHat for the support. Sure, it's questionable whether RH will make its main bucks off of support, but it makes IT people happier to pay for it. So much the better for everyone.
:)
And calling someone an oaf isn't exactly elevating the debate to the next level, now is it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, here, but isn't the support that comes with the purchase of an Official Red Hat copy just for install support? Granted, you can purchase additional support from Red Hat for extra ducats, just like you can for that other company. But if I'm not scanning blank sectors, the "support with the official version" is just for installation support.
Therefore, what is the benefit of purchasing more than one "official" copy of the RH distro? So you just buy one copy and REALLY get your money's worth out of the RH Install Support team.
And you are correct: Name-calling is not elevating the debate to the next level.
Geordon
It is by caffiene alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire
Recently Slashdot had an article about software piracy. A number of slashdotters said how that most who pirate software, would not have bought it otherwise.
I think that is true with Red Hat. Most people who use Red Hat, wouldn't use Red Hat if they had to pay. But there are many who do pay, to support what Red Hat is doing.
Sorta like AOL disks. Well, not exactly like AOL disks, but similar. Give out the software for free, let it penetrate the market. In software industry, the more people who use software, the even more people who use the software. Im going to make a guess and say that the people who pay for Red Hat is proportional to the people who don't pay. So, by giving the software free and keeping the quality high of their distro, they get many people using it and more people paying for Red Hat Linux.
This works, because in my judgment, their are more newbies buy Linux than people already familiar to it. When the ratio changes, however, we won't be screwed though. Then the distrobutions will need to make money off of people upgrading their distrobutions. Even if Linux monopolizes the market, we will have numerous distros, trying to compete for market. Just think how much better the world would be if there were multiple distributions of Windows. The competition would raise software quality sky high and their would be a distribution for each niche of the market.
I can dream, can't I?
--
If Joe User's video card doesn't work or if Widgets-R-Us can't get Linux using their VME backplane, they'll switch back to windows98 or LynxOS, no matter how heavily they've marketed themselves. For RH to succeed, they need to have a continually improving product. If the rest of the OS community doesn't provide the software they need, it makes sense for them to do it themselves. It's a lot cheaper to improve the product when you can rely on improvement that other contributors have made. RH and the Linux community could get a HUGE bang for their R&D buck (compared to closed-source R&D). Things improve a whole lot faster in the OS world than in the proprietary world.
RH relies on the OS movement so they aren't going to be able to go proprietary on us. We'd cut them off if they did. Hell we've come close to slaying MS, RH would be a piece of cake (since their entire product is owned by us). Besides, they know that if we they give to us, we will give back to them. People trust RH and they provide a valuble service. If they want new and expanding markets:
use that money to develop new drivers.
Create a driver developer kit and documentation for vendors.
Write some good books or start some education programs
My response (also sent to Mark Anderson (the author) at http://www.ab cnews.go.com/sections/tech/NextFiles/mail_nextfile s.html):
>> Most interesting of all: despite all this talk about getting revenues from services and tech support, virtually all of the company's revenues to date have come from box sales. (Take that, open-source freaks.)
I don't understand why you attack the open-source movement.
First, RedHat software has contributed megabytes of source to the Linux community. This will, in all likelyhood, continue as it has in the past.
Second, Linux will remain freely available. Even RedHat's "version" will still be available for download, free of charge. It will also be available on low cost CD, produced by other companies (look at www.linuxmall.com or www.cheapbytes.com). Anyone can take any particular distribution of Linux (or create their own) and sell it themselves.
I use RedHat Linux 5.2. I purchased it from RedHat because I believe in what they are doing. However, I did this because I wanted to. I wasn't forced to purchase it. I encourage all people who use RedHat software to purchase it from them, to give them some recognition for the work they've put into it. What I feel you are really paying for is support, should you need it. At this point, I haven't needed any more help than I can find in the Linux How-Tos.
I wish RedHat all the best and hope they do become profitable. This would prove that OSS (Open Source Software) does have a place in mainstream software markets. It also might take us somewhere closer to the realization that this "real business model" you talk about isn't the only way to do things.
It's great that RedHat is spending a money on Linux, and that everything they do is GPL'd. Rpm, in particular, has been a great boon to Linux. (Debian's package manager might be better, but rpm came first).
But, remember Brooks' (sp?) law -- Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. Or, pouring more money into an ill-conceived project (Gnome, Windows) just makes it bigger, and bloatier. Through shear brute-force effort you may be able to patch most of the obvious bugs , but you won't have a stable, maintainable, extendable system without starting from scratch with a cleaner architecture.
Gnome is an ill-conveived system. It's architecture was thrown together in haste, and many of it's most praised features, like "window manager independence" were in fact just spin on the fact that they hadn't thought things through. "Language independence" means that they coded everything in the lowest common denominator, "C". They have not acheived true language independence through Corba, yet. Object-oriented programming works very well in gui programming. Although object-oriented programming is possible in languages that don't directly support it (witness Motif, Gtk), just as it's possible to program in a procedural style using assembly, it's a lot easier to do object-oriented programming in languages that support object-oriented programming. Again, if you want true language independence, use CORBA.
But, Gnome's failure wouldn't be a big deal if it were just one of among many desktop attempts. Darwinism, letting the best code win, is one of the open source model's strengths. You get some duplication of effort, sure, but that effort doesn't usually waste much money since it's programmers working on their own time. In Gnome's case, however, RedHat is unlikely just to drop it and use something else. They have too much money invested in it. So, RedHat will continue pushing Gnome in the media, and will still be the default desktop environment in their distribution. Even though it's inferior. This will hamper the development of end user applications for Linux, since Gnome is an awkward system to write for. Of course developers could just write for KDE, or wxWindows (which wraps Gtk nicely), or whatever, but they can't ignore default desktop environment on the dominant distribution if they want their apps to be widely used. Gnome is already slowing down end-user acceptance of Linux. If Joe User walks into Best-Buy to buy Linux, he'll probablly pick up RedHat. He'll probablly also use Gnome as his windowing environment, since that's what comes up by default. He'll probablly also get really frustrated when Gnome locks up, when he finds out he has two control panels to worry about (Enlightenment's and Gnomes), etc.
In spite of all this, I still think RedHat has done many great things for the community. I just think that we're sticking our heads in the sand if we deny the fact that there are some down sides to RedHat's dominence (in the U.S., at least).
-------------------------------------------
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
He says that virtually all of redhat's revenue
comes from box sales ("take that open source
freaks").
Funny, I thought virtually all of redhat's revenue
comes from Linux (and the sweat of unpaid
thousands). Let's face it: RedHat is primarily
a service company and the service they provide
is putting together useful distributions and
testing them. They also do a fair amount of
code cutting too but that's not why I buy RH: I
buy it for the months of effort it would take to
put together my own GNU/Linux configuration.
He uses RedHat as an example of why the OS
movement is bogus but they actually are living
proof that you don't need to "own" the code to make money off it!
Although I agree with a preceding reply that you mistook this line I am responding to your point.
It is foolish to just assume that GPL, OSS, etc is enough to keep Linux from being damaged in some way. Do not underestimate money.
We still have to eat. Police can still throw us in jail. Governments can still create and sustain nonsensical laws. In the end it is all driven by money. The quest for money has to potential to create mechanisms we have never seen before (this continually happens) so being protected from past mechanisms is no guaruntee Linux is safe.
OK, so $100M isnt that much..really. But in software $100M can be $100B in no time flat, just look at M$.
Here is one scenario...maybe not what will happen, but just an example to show that GPL is not enough. RH grows. RH grows some more. RH management turns over a couple times. Stock holders wants more. RH decides to try to differentiate. A kernel split happens. They promote and develop self serving ideas (convoluted integration of their component model with the kernel for example). They have captured the server and desktop markets (academic and scientific markets remains open of course) and have therefore closed any hope of Linus Linux surviving in the market (to PHB the difference is Linuxes is nothing; Linux == Linux). Result: open Linux that is not controlled by RH becomes a non-factor. Linux revision control has effectively been taken over by RH, a for profit common stock company.
the guy asks if the linux community will accept RedHat's contributions to the source if they're making money for it... is this guy daft? they [the modifications] would be judged and accepted or denied the same way they always have been --- by their merit!
... but Anonymous Cowards swallow.