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.

Comments

A little worrisome...

[Ethelred Unraed]

I'm a little worried about this putative rivalry between Red Hat and LinuxCare, if it is indeed as rabid as Salon makes it out to be. Love 'em or hate 'em, Red Hat is quite possibly the most important distribution for getting Linux to spread beyond its current user base, with perhaps SuSE close behind. Red Hat gets most of its income from support, not from sales of CDs.

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