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Red Hat Rivalries at Salon
EvilNight
writes "There's an interesting article up on Salon that
makes a few comparisons between Red Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading.
They also touch a little on the squabbles between LinuxCare and
Red Hat. " A very good article. Covers a lot of the
issues, and clearly.
SuSE is at least as big as Red Hat, but much of their coding effort goes into proprietary stuff that you and I will never benefit from. Where did you get THAT bullshit from? my alternative email address: Michael Hasenstein
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Michael Hasenstein
http://www.csn.tu-chemnitz.de/~mha/
Why should commercial rivalry be considered 'mature' ?
It sounds like the politics of the playground to me.
so what's the etc., come on... Michael Hasenstein PS: (No, I deleted the comment about the first part of the sentense. It's just not necessary.)
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.csn.tu-chemnitz.de/~mha/
What the article failed to mention was the impact of the distributors on the non-kernel projects.
Linus has a pretty firm grip on the kernel itself, so I don't worry about it, but the desktop environment is another matter.
RedHat is now practically in charge of GNOME, and they don't compete with other commercial developers here, but with independent groups of free sw developers (KDE, Window Maker, maybe E).
What they did with the release of GNOME 1.0 was basically a copy of MS marketing methods:
Fool customers into thinking they get the best (and mature) solution;
Denounce the competition as worthless and doomed;
Use massive marketing power to get their FUD in the press.
This is a serious breach with the tradition of fairness and respect in the Linux community, and is sufficient for me to boycott RedHat.
In late 70s, early 80s UNIX was nearly open source.
Universities had nearly-free source licenses
and hackers like Bill Joy were inventing vi,
virtual memory, XWindows, etc.
Then the lure of commercial UNIX workstations
came along and submerged the community.
Not completely bad, because Sun still innovates
and is realatively open about its standards
compared to competitors.
If you want to get really technical,
Linux : kernel, GNU/Linux : OS, [Slackware,RedHat,Caldera] : Distribution Channel
and:
NT : kernel, NT : OS, NT : Distribution.
Mmmmn. choices choices.
Lowmag.net
Hmmm let's see how about chatting with the "German Spies" (i.e. SuSE guys) at the 1999 Linux Expo. More specifically at the party they held at The Warehouse in Raleigh.
Or how about just reading the license agreement that comes with your SuSE CD?
such users are the key to M$ success (just leave them dumb and happy and take a lot of money from them for it).
i think a lot of such complaints about RH's support such as yours comes from hardcore windows users which hate to learn anything thus they feel under attack when someone sugest them to read 10 lines from some HOWTO.
i also have to say that i never called MS support but a friend of mine worked for such and i had a chance to hear some answers: those answers were not helping you with your problem. they were just helping you with the actual incarnation of problem. such answer did not provide you with "how it works" so you do not know why it did not works. and such answers i'm not counting as "good support".
(i also understand, that "good" support do not makes the supporter a lot of money. same as "stable and fully featured windows": no one will upgrade them thus M$ is not producing them)
hany
Err... CodeWarrior for Debian.
The guy who runs Gnome is not a Red Hat employee.
Just a note -- the above article is only the first page, less than a third of the whole article.
Editor, Salon Business & Technology
Salon.com
Suppose LinuxCare, which does not have its own distribution, were to choke off Red Hat's supply line by killing off RH's support. Where does that leave Red Hat? Where does that leave Linux in general? We'd be left with Debian, Slackware, et. al., all of which are highly advanced distros, but none of which can really set foot in the enterprise or home market (cf. PHB, MomTest).
In the end, only Red Hat and SuSE are in a position to spread Linux beyond its current "market" and seriously challenge Microsoft. If one or both of them dies off (or at least only limps along), Linux will not get anywhere. _Some_ kind of corporate or organized backing is needed.
I'm not suggesting that anyone boycott LinuxCare for the sake of Red Hat--far from it. I wish them well. Rather, I suggest that Red Hat and LinuxCare merge, cooperate, or that LinuxCare offers its own polished distro, for the sake of the greater good. A rivalry between the two--as things are now--is a Very Bad Thing(TM).
Just my thoughts...
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
How would such a measure be made? Percentage of packages that come with the "official" version of the distribution that are GPL? Absolute number of such packages? Total lines of GPL'd code available?
Or is Leonard just forgetting Debian (odd, since it was part of the hook for the story)?
According to Metrowerks once they've finished QA testing it won't just say "for Red Hat". If you're gonna bash Redhat, at least get your facts straight.
that's gnuFree software, thanks very much.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I think the Linux community is a little too "alternative". Just because RH is public and may possibly dominate the linux development scene in the future does not mean they control it. Just remember that Linux does not survive on commerciallism, and someone making a profit off of it does not mean they possess the ability to monopolize it.
You took two words out of the context of the full statement. Please re-read the full statement again and we'll gladly accept your "doh".
Please re-read the original post. I wrote "customer service" and not "support"
I have no problem using Linux. I have no problem admin. Linux. I can read HOW TOs and understand them.
I am talking "customer service" - M$ treated me better than RH
So what's the beef if they GPL their code? Personally, I think they've come up with a pretty innovative business model and that they will de facto contribute to the advancement of OSS by being successful.
Sure, maybe RPM isn't the height of technical beauty, I'll bet your code is so perfect at ver 1.0 that no 2.0 is ever required.
I think it's great that they can provide an attractive enough working environment for their hackers that they can get them jazzed about working there.
"I believe the children are our future: nasty, brutish and short."
RH is the primary (only?) funder of the Gnome project, has the most core developers, and RH Labs is where most of the new implementations are designed. The only reason why Miguel has not been hired is so Gnome still has some resemblance to an independent project. But RH does keep a close handle on him (whose idea do you think it was for the unstable 1.0 release?).
Let's see.. I have never seen any donations from RedHat; just hiring of people like Havoc Pennington, Rasterman, etcetera for their own gain.
What? They are listed among the FSF Patrons in March 1998 GNU's Bulletin.
> And they're releasing bugridden nowhere *near*
>ready distributions, charing $80 for the same
>stuff they were charging $40 for last version,
>and marketing their asses off as they prepare to
>pass off a substantial amount of control via
>their IPO.
Yeah, so what's your gripe? No one forces you to buy their boxed set or to buy their stock.
>What have they REALLY done for the community?
Ever hear of Alan Cox? Think he's made any contributions to the community? RedHat pays his salary to do what he does. His work goes to Linus to ultimately be released in new kernels. RedHat gets it the same time everyone else does.
You feel RH is okay, others do not. Don't try to force your opinion on me thank you very much.
Geez, "German Spies"? American idiot would be the same level response...
Slashdot would stop running these Red Hat is Microsoft incarnate articles. To my knowledge, Red Hat has never done anything Microsoftish. SuSE has acted like a bastard on may occasions (undermining Red Hat's IPO, etc.), Caldera and TurboLinux aren't too polite either, but Red Hat is pretty damn angelic for a company.
the way to implement "open employment" semantics is to use the GPL.
One is that we need to have access to hardware documentation in order to write drivers. Fortunately, we have seen much progress on this front. In the past few years, many companies have realized the value of releasing their programming docs so that drivers can be written. (I would like to know if the NDAs that RedHat has negotiated include release of the HW docs when the GPL'ed code is released, though...)
The other is that we need to have Open Employment -- the freedom to hack no matter who is our current or previous employer. Until recently, this hasn't been much of an issue, since few people were paid to hack free software. Now that we have many companies that pay employees to work on free/open software, we need to ensure that the employers don't restrict the freedom to develop.
This restriction could be done in a number of ways, either explicitly or implicitly. An explicit restriction could be a clause preventing employees from working on similar or competing products when they leave the company. An implicit restriction could be something like an NDA on hardware docs that only releases them to that company's employees. Both implicit and explicit restrictions tie the developer's productivity to remaining with the company. If restrictions like this are in place, then a developer who left the company, for whatever reason, might not be free to continue their work.
Now, I'm not accusing Red Hat of having these restrictions. In fact, I think Rasterman's recent departure from Red Hat to continue work on Enlightenment at VA shows that Red Hat does not have these restrictions.
But now that commercial Free/Open development is becoming the fad, I think it might be time to think about some Open Employment guidelines. Here's a quick brain dump for you to chew on (or chew up and spit out):
These Open Employment guidelines are designed to safeguard the freedom of an Open Source developer to continue contributing to the community.
The neat think about commercial Open Source development is that companies are realizing that what's good for the community is ultimately good for the company as well.
Comments?
The short time I worked at Pacific HiTech, I only knew a Cliff Miller, and a Craig Oda. Who's Craig Miller?
:-)
Maybe Cliff has adopted Craig as his son?
Lotsa inaccuracies in there. I think a bit too much credence was giving to the C library issue. There's really only one C library. Is everybody supposed to stick with libc5 forever?
Cheers,
- Jim
I don't think she meant to suggest that Red Hat owned Linux. Rather, she meant that in the same way that my OS is Linux, or Fred's is OpenBSD, Red Hat's is Linux.
Or something. Hey, I've never met Ms. London.
i'm sorry. i'm taking it back.
(my post is wrong as related to yours)
hany
I have personally gotten better customer service through Microsoft than through Red Hat.
:)
In fact, Red Hat has been fairly rude to me.
Oh, 1st post!
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
Amen.
You can't say it much better than your third point: THEIR SOURCE IS OPEN. EMBRACE IT.
Werd.
Subjects robert is sick of #99920: Red Hat is not Microsoft.
So they release bleeding edge software. Good for them.
So their boxed cds are expensive. If they can sell them, good for them.
Everything that comes out of Red Had Labs is GPLed. Good for them.
I love Red Hat.
... so why do people throw a negative spin on companies who try to make a buck? Remember: Linux is about having an open source OS. NOTHING MORE!
Corndog
Lets just get down to the facts of the Everyone vs. RedHat. When it comes down to it RedHat is the driving force of the linux world. Im not at all taking anything away from any distrobutions out there, in fact I use Slackware, but if it wasnt for RedHat the community would not grow.
A brand new linux user cannot simply jump into slackware and install it and get everything going because its not "easy", however on the flip side of the coin all they need to do with RedHat is boot up and click Workstation, Server or if they want to get to the nitty gritty, Custom and they are rocking.
RedHat has done what it set out to do. It has created an operating environment using the linux kernel that destroys anything Microsoft could ever produce. I love to hear people on the internet say "I hate RedHat" because when you ask them "why?" they just stutter, and say because its crap, or because its no good. They cant give you a true honest reason.
RedHat as a company is not doing anything wrong. They are trying to get into the corporate market, and to do that you have to have an image that can be presented to CEO's. A naked woman with a RedHat CD over her ass is not going to get that for them. When you have an investment you protect it. This is merely all RedHat is doing and you CANNOT blame them for that. They are not playing any of the dirty games that Bill Gates did/does, they are producing an awesome OS that is free. For crying out loud just leave them alone and if you "dont like RedHat", there is a simple solution. DONT USE IT, and DONT push your opinion on other people.
Regards, Ryan McAdams
I think the last part of the article is a masterful sumnation... Linux is growing up.
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
We want to oust MS, force them right out - or at least make them produce good, cheap software and adopt a proactive attitude to the industry as a whole. Anyway, the only way they'll be forced out is by valid competition - RH are the nearest the Linux world has got to a "proper" company.
I could go on for the need to come up with a definative set of standards for a Linux gooey - not a STANDARDIZED gui, but a set of standards for them all to stick too, but I won't (though I just did).
I think people are giving RH a hard time because they're maybe disenfranchising the industry as a whole with their continued and growing dominance - tough! RH still give you their work under GPL, M$ are highly unlikely to do that unless somebody forces their hand... I think that somebody is Red Hat.
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Before we begin tearing Red Hat apart for all the real and imaginary wickedness they've perpetrated against Free Software, quality and choice, and reading through all the redundant posts that defend them, I propose the following solution that should at least make this latest flamefest worthwhile.
A voluntary Red Hat Bashing Tax, payable, for want of a better metric, in lines of code contributed to Free Software and/or Open Source projects. Say for instance that someone feels compelled to toss around unfunny parodies of Red Hat's name, like "FUD Hat", "Red$at" or "RootHat". Each occurance would oblige the posting individual to submit 10 lines of acceptable code to the project of their choice. More extreme complaints, such as Red Hat "forcing" people to use buggy software or not allowing the posting individual to configure their system without a GUI, would require 100+ lines of code submitted. Complaints about RPM could be a special case, in which the complaining party could submit code that corrects the alleged deficiency in RPM, regardless of line count.
I believe such a policy would greatly benefit the Free Software community by generating a virtually infinite supply of new code while letting people vent all their frustrations and fears against a favorite target.
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John 3:16 - God's Public License
Since when has a spokes person (to be PC) ever known anything about their own product? heh heh
Brad
Pity the market leader in such a climate. Red Hat
spokeswoman Melissa London laughs at the Microsoft comparison:
"It's so funny -- when was the last time you saw Microsoft make its operating system available for free download and remain committed to that?"
Since when is Linux Red Hat's operating system?
Bit arrogant, that. I suppose you could argue
that it's a question of semantics, but the point
has to be made. A distribution is not an
operating system. Almost all of what's on a Red
Hat CD is freely available elsewhere.
K.
-
How come there's an "open source" entry in the
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
I can't help but laugh when *everyone* descends to defend the freedom and non-commercialism of Redhat, when at the same time I have an advert for CodeWarrior flashing at the top of the screen which has been shackled to only REDHAT linux.
OK - you can let the OS be free, but you can still chain them with apps...
And it's FREE. It remains to be seen whether Code Fusion will be as good or better than Code Crusader, but as it is, if you're looking for something like a good IDE, Code Crusader is one of the best candidates for the role.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
Red Hat isn't Microsoft. LinuxCare isn't Microsoft. The XFree project isn't Microsoft. SuSE isn't Microsoft. Debian GNU/Linux isn't Microsoft. Heck, if Microsoft GPL'ed their code, they wouldn't be Microsoft.
Let's get on with it, folks. :)
Uh, why doesn't this story have Red Hat's logo?
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John 3:16 - God's Public License
. . . this is Salon trolling Slashdot. They know it will just start another going nowhere debate. Almost all of the quotes seem to be rehashes from other articles or anonymous/out of the blue quotes. Side A of issue followed by Side B.
Interestingly they don't get to the true meat until the final page A) Redhat GPL's all their stuff B) which they don't state overtly--whiners worried about losing a competitive edge to companies who glomb kernel/OSS hackers are nothing more than whiners. For kernel issues, planning, bleeding edge garbage, where they are going, etc. etc.--why not go to *The Source*--the Kernel mailing list. Yes, for a non-kernel hacker or C-pro-pro (DemiGod) it is hard, and the companies who hire the kernel hackers do gain a slight advantage as they have in house experts, but that is called "doing business".
RedHat is a company that wants to sell support--and a large part of that is selling it to *companies* not Joe-Doom. RedHat has found the best selling point to attract those companies--they have the source of the source. A RedHat rep dealing with a large company deploying an in house app has access to the people who know the kernel (as well as other apps) inside and out.
As the article says, if RedHat makes a misstep they would quickly lose their advantage because the kernel hackers and other OSS leaders do not want proprietary solutions.
And for the whiners worried about price and using the newest libraries--I'll give you a hint--**Never buy/use/install anything that is #.0**. And last I checked you do have choices, and as long as it is GPL'd this can not change.
...for how a Linux company can succeed.
SuSE, Caldera, etc. don't have faith in Linux. They GPL only what they have to. They use proprietary licensing for the rest.
Red Hat believes in Linux. They believe so much that they GPL everything (and they certainly don't have to). It's a very ballsy strategy, and I am glad it is working out well for them.
I interviewed for a job at Red Hat this week and one of the things I wanted to understand clearly was that I was free to contribute any software I wanted back into the community, regardless of whether Red Hat used my code or not. No problem. I like that. My current employer made me sign something that says everything I write, on or off the clock, is their intellectual property. I think it's so cool that Red Hat is so secure about their product and expertise that they don't have to resort to such tactics.
SuSE and Caldera should be getting the bulk of flames here. SuSE is at least as big as Red Hat, but much of their coding effort goes into proprietary stuff that you and I will never benefit from.
At the Linux Expo I saw Ransom Love of Caldera ask one very prominent president of a linux hardware company when he would be offering Caldera products on their hardware. The honest answer was "When Caldera GPL's its entire distribution."
Making money requires that companies make advantages for themselves. If Red Hat's advantage is they get the code out months before anyone else, great. We still get the code, and they get the competetive lead. This is healthy competition. This is a Good Thing if I ever saw it. When companies use underhanded tactics like using IP laws and patents to stay on top in software, then you know their products and their people don't stand strong on their own.
Light Blue
(hopefully Light Red soon)
Had she said, "when was the last time you saw Microsoft make its particular configuration and distribution of Windows available for free download," I imagine some people would have had a -legitimate- complaint: i.e. it would have been detached from reality and made no sense.
/. moderaters be given an English comprehension test?
It, sir, is completely a "question of semantics": she did not use the words, "Linux is Red Hat's operating system." She chose a perfectly cogent way to express a sound sentiment - why are you reading 'arrogance' into this when she offered none?
Should
The article falls victim to what it is discussing - rampant over-analysis. Red hat is a company trying to make a living at supporting Linux for the business workplace. Is it so wrong for them to defend their image that they've worked to hard to build? Everyone fears the "Bill-Borg" so bad we're doing a witch hunt on anyone who smacks of success.
Lest we forget the days of Apple vs. IBM where it was the hobbists versus the Mega Corporate Monster, remember what became of that (besides spawning the "Bill-Borg") -- legitimization of the PC as a tool, not a toy. Same with Red Hat. They are going to turn the "hacker os" into a legitimate os and we'll all be better for it because since it's open source code, the os can't be the leverage to force another monopoly.
So let Red Hat be the company they want to be, and in this modern democracy vote your opinion with the standard business voting ballot -- the allmighty dollar.
Seems relevant here. People are free to call anything anything they want.
What, praytell, is that?
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
I like RedHat. They function as the development labs for Mandrake. I give Mandrake my Linux dollars now because they fix the problems with RedHat.
Mandrake is about the number 2 most popular CD over at LinuxMall. How many millions have RedHat lost due to their bugs and brain dead support of KDE?