It's my hope that someone from Red Hat management reads this thread and tries to understand just how they have abandoned a large group of it's core loyal base. Most importantly I want them to understand the market share they have lost and what it will take to get it back again. It would be easy to miss this loss because the Linux market has been expanding so the impact to the bottom line may not be obvious yet.
Personally I switched from Slackware to Red Hat sometime around RH5.4. This allowed me to test a lot of things before ever proposing a solution to a client. Over the years as a consultant I have been in a position to influence a large number of well known organizations regarding open source products. Red Hat was a safe recommendation for a lot of my customers... until the RHEL/Fedora mess. There is no way I could allow my small to mid-sized clients to build business systems on Fedora. There was no upgrade path, not to mention the future of the very product was uncertain at best. As for my Large Enterprise clients RHEL was also uncertain too. Any company that was willing to isolate it's core supporters in a radical shift of it's business model could also shift again. Not that Red Hat was on the ropes but this is just the kind of move Dot Coms did as they started to self-destruct. This is not to say that RH was on its death bed rather it hinted that the product line was less than stable. Linux tends to get implemented in business systems where availability is critical. The stability of a product line is a major part of the equation when designing these systems. Because of this I couldn't recommend RHEL to my enterprise clients. Even if I wanted to push a Red Hat solution there was so much FUD (pun intended) around the future support of Red Hat most of my clients wanted to avoid the whole issue. I still have a few clients that are Red Hat shops. However, I know for a fact that Red Hat has lost business because of this.
Case in point, Cisco Systems has had to redefine it's business market. The Route and Switch space is becoming a commodity. Imagine the reaction if Cisco Systems stated that they were dropping their Route and Switch products to solely focus on security products and software. Yes, the market is demanding this but they are leveraging their existing customer base and easing in to a new business model. If they didn't companies like ISS would be more then happy to fill the void in Cisco System's growth market.
Now we are in the year 2005 and Red Hat has announced that it wants to embrace it's old core of supporters again. If Red Hat wants to win me back as a supporter it will have to woo me. It least convince me that they are not going to abandon me and most importantly my customers. For now I have been pushing my larger clients to things like SuSE/Novell and my Ma and Pa shops to Debian based distros. Bottom line is that Red Hat needs to earn my trust again. I suspect that I am not alone in this. I also suspect that I am not the only one in an position to make recommendations on this issue. Red Hat is a good company and I would like to see it succeed. However, before I can start recommending them again I need to feel they will not isolate and abandon it's supporter and user base again.
"It's 3AM, I'm drunk and I have an Internet connection."
The CENSORED act has not affected ma at all. I work at CENSORED and we have no CENSORED. I have noticed no difference in my life at CENSORED since theCENSORED act came to be. I can even process CENSORED reports and look at all the files in the CENSORED. I do not believe that the act has caused any censorship or CENSORED on the part of CENSORED . Any on who think they are affected adversely onlt need to lodge a complaint with the bureau of CENSORED. You can e-mail them at CENSORED@CENSORED . You can also reach them via the url www.CENSORED.CENSORED
Respectfully,
CENSORED
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It's my hope that someone from Red Hat management reads this thread and tries to understand just how they have abandoned a large group of it's core loyal base. Most importantly I want them to understand the market share they have lost and what it will take to get it back again. It would be easy to miss this loss because the Linux market has been expanding so the impact to the bottom line may not be obvious yet.
Personally I switched from Slackware to Red Hat sometime around RH5.4. This allowed me to test a lot of things before ever proposing a solution to a client. Over the years as a consultant I have been in a position to influence a large number of well known organizations regarding open source products. Red Hat was a safe recommendation for a lot of my customers... until the RHEL/Fedora mess. There is no way I could allow my small to mid-sized clients to build business systems on Fedora. There was no upgrade path, not to mention the future of the very product was uncertain at best. As for my Large Enterprise clients RHEL was also uncertain too. Any company that was willing to isolate it's core supporters in a radical shift of it's business model could also shift again. Not that Red Hat was on the ropes but this is just the kind of move Dot Coms did as they started to self-destruct. This is not to say that RH was on its death bed rather it hinted that the product line was less than stable. Linux tends to get implemented in business systems where availability is critical. The stability of a product line is a major part of the equation when designing these systems. Because of this I couldn't recommend RHEL to my enterprise clients. Even if I wanted to push a Red Hat solution there was so much FUD (pun intended) around the future support of Red Hat most of my clients wanted to avoid the whole issue. I still have a few clients that are Red Hat shops. However, I know for a fact that Red Hat has lost business because of this.
Case in point, Cisco Systems has had to redefine it's business market. The Route and Switch space is becoming a commodity. Imagine the reaction if Cisco Systems stated that they were dropping their Route and Switch products to solely focus on security products and software. Yes, the market is demanding this but they are leveraging their existing customer base and easing in to a new business model. If they didn't companies like ISS would be more then happy to fill the void in Cisco System's growth market.
Now we are in the year 2005 and Red Hat has announced that it wants to embrace it's old core of supporters again. If Red Hat wants to win me back as a supporter it will have to woo me. It least convince me that they are not going to abandon me and most importantly my customers. For now I have been pushing my larger clients to things like SuSE/Novell and my Ma and Pa shops to Debian based distros. Bottom line is that Red Hat needs to earn my trust again. I suspect that I am not alone in this. I also suspect that I am not the only one in an position to make recommendations on this issue. Red Hat is a good company and I would like to see it succeed. However, before I can start recommending them again I need to feel they will not isolate and abandon it's supporter and user base again.
"It's 3AM, I'm drunk and I have an Internet connection."
The CENSORED act has not affected ma at all. I work at CENSORED and we have no CENSORED. I have noticed no difference in my life at CENSORED since theCENSORED act came to be. I can even process CENSORED reports and look at all the files in the CENSORED. I do not believe that the act has caused any censorship or CENSORED on the part of CENSORED . Any on who think they are affected adversely onlt need to lodge a complaint with the bureau of CENSORED. You can e-mail them at CENSORED@CENSORED . You can also reach them via the url www.CENSORED.CENSORED Respectfully, CENSORED