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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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).
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Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com