One of the minor ironies of the Linux world is the slight disconnect between the mantra of “choice” the most ardent advocates use to make the case for a multitude of graphical interfaces and the state of the North American enterprise Linux market, where a single distributor has dominated since the late ’90s. That distributor is, of course, Red Hat, and while the numbers analysts produce about its share of the Linux market vary, they consistently hover above 75 percent. The company is so dominant that it’s not uncommon to hear less savvy executives simply refer to the distro as “Linux,” which infuriates many.
Enterprise Unix Roundup: Picking at the Red Hat Lock-In
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I’m not trying to suggest that it isn’t true. But, I would like to know how they could possibly arrive at such a figure.
For example: are they counting downloads? Or just boxed sets? Are they only counting business users? Or do home users count also?
and stomped it flat.
sure there’s fedora, but the big issue was that a large number of experienced users were very vocal/supportive of redhat.
anytime anyone new to the linux scene was thinking about throwing up a server, redhat was always first choice.
much of this loyal base had to then decide what to do about their redhat 9 servers.
either way it was going to necessitate a migration.
many weren’t about to reward redhat for pulling the carpet out. i would have gladly paid them the $300-$500 a year to keep our rh9 box running with prompt security updates.
it wasn’t even an option.
so since we had to reload anyway, we loaded up a mix of debian and slack.
..everything is open source in the distro. For instance, you can take your Apache config file to any distro and reconfigure the values to, say, SuSE’s Apache directories.
Its not Redhat’s fault that they were the first major vendor, and in my mind, still the best distro out there. Hell, SuSE/Novell still charges a rediculous amount for their desktop/server distros. I can download Fedora, for free, from anywhere and use Freshrpms.net to get all the goodies like MP3 and DVD support.
Redhat is the highest quality distro out there.
They contribute so much back, good for them for doing well.
In other news:
I think ubuntu will put some real pressure under fedora in the upcoming year, we’ll see.
“…Hell, SuSE/Novell still charges a rediculous amount for their desktop/server distros…..”
You can download Suse 9.1 Personal from LinuxIso for Free:
http://www.linuxiso.org
Or you can download Suse 9.2 Live from Distrowatch.com:
http://distrowatch.com/index.php?distribution=suse&month=October&ye…
What is the author smoking? What lock-in are they talking about? RedHat is 100% open source code. Let me repeat that for those who missed it. RedHat is 100% open source code. They contribute *every* *single* *line* back to the community. There isn’t any lock-in, here. High-market share and bundling agreements don’t constitute lock-in. RedHat isn’t keeping any specs closed to keep people from switching to another OS. They aren’t a monopoly, so any bundling agreements don’t constitute lock-in. There is no lock-in, just a damn good product released by a damn good company.
Customers are free to choose RedHat, just as they are free to choose their competitors.
It so happens that a lot of people do choose RedHat, but i would be interested to hear what more Redhat could do (they already make everything they do publically available) to allow their competitors access to the market they seem to be the dominant player in.
There is no barrier to entry here, and if you want to take Redhat’s entire product, rebrand it as your own and sell service and support on top of it, nobody from Redhat is going to stop you.
Try and apply that model to Microsoft, Sun, IBM OSes and see how far you get.
There is no such thing as OS vendor lock in, there is application forced vendor lock in. You can only run Oracle, IBM Web Sphere products on one of 2 choices. Suse and Red Hat. If you choose to run these apps on another Linux distro more power to you. It will probably work but good luck getting support.
Talk to the Application vendors, complain that they force you to use Suse or Red Hat to get support. Tell them that you want to run it on Gentoo or Ubuntu with less than 1% user base. After they finish laughing at you and hang up, realize that it’s not Red Hat or Suse’ fault that Application vendors only support OSs with more than 50% market share.
Just because people CHOOSE to use redhat doesnt mean there is a lock in. name a single lock in feature thats provided by redhat?. this guy is smoking crack
…Redhat going out of its way to make sure Oracle and so on work on tis OS is a bad thing. why shouls they work for their competitors. Such accreditations cost money and if you want Oracle to urn on your Debian, or Lindows, or Mandrake, call Oracle.
Congrats to Red Hat for running a first rate Linux and open source business. They do make a very good distro, and they are a good all around company. Both Szulik and Tiemann impress the hell out of me. They make McNealy and Schwartz of Sun look like idiots (McNealy and Schwartz already do a good job of that!).
The end of life-ing of Red Hat 9 turned out to be brilliant move. A lot of people whined, but there were plenty of options:
1. Migrate to RHEL
2. Migrate to Fedora Core, with support that can be purchased from third parties.
3. Stay with Red Hat 9, and purchase support from, again, a third party.
4. Migrate to a Red Hat derivative, like Lineox or White Box
5. Migrate to another distro
And when Red Hat did this, their profits went through the roof. And they offered a very good, cutting edge distro for free to all the home desktop / hobby users in Fedora Core. This was a fine gift to the community. Then they could concentrate their revenue stream on the Enterprise, which is where the money is for them. Companies want to pay for support and certification and stability, and Red Hat provides this very very well.
And kudos to Red Hat for staying 100% open source, and building a highly successful business in the process.
Also give major kudos to Red Hat for counter-sueing SCO, as well as donating $1,000,000 for legal defense of Linux users.
And still more kudos for Red Hat for contributing heavy development work both to the Linux Kernel and to Gnome.
And no one needs to worry about Red Hat getting a “Linux monopoly”. Novell/SuSE, along with Mandrake and Debian, will make sure of that.
Mandrake is my favorite distro. But I’ve got great respect for Red Hat, both for their fine products, and for their successful business.
I’m saying that Red Hat is going out of it’s way to make sure that Oracle runs on Red Hat. I’m not at all saying that this is a bad thing. In fact, as you say accreditions cost money, if you want the app to run on your platform advocate it, and do it professionally.
When an application provider realizes that an OS has
a)reached a critical mass worth them spending time certifying the product
b)and is willing to pay the fee required for the application provider to go through the paces to take the time to certify their product
they will do it.
It’s also important to realize that running these applications also have many special requirements of the Operating System. Take a look at the requirements for Oracle or Web Sphere. Oracle’s Unbreakable requires quite a bit of HA hardware you than open up a pandoras box of hardware support. Lets not go down these roads
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
http://www.centos.org/
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
http://www.taolinux.org/
http://www.lineox.com/
Quote: “Redhat is the highest quality distro out there. ”
What a load of baloney. Any long term Linux user worth his weight in gold will tell you that that statement is pure and utter baloney. I’d rather Debian that Redhat any day. Period.
As to Redhat isn’t a monopoly – no, they’re not. There’s healthy competition in the Linux community, unlike with proprietary operating systems.
However – there is most certainly vendor lock in – if I want to run Oracle on Linux and get support i’m *forced* to run it on Redhat or Suse. That is NOT healthy.
Also, Redhat runs exceptionally heavily modified kernels – something that I disagree with. Backporting items from a 2.6 kernel into 2.4 is not what I consider the way to do things. That’s a waste of time and duplication – better to go to a 2.6 kernel, test it and then provided feedback to the kernel team. That way 2.6 improves. Redhat are milking 2.6 kernel enhancements/features without realistically giving back improvements, as the improvements are bastardised into their own proprietary kernels.
Redhat has been known to ship cutting edge packages that are simply broken. Remember the GCC stuff years back? That said, many other distros are guilty of the same issue.
Dave
…. as the improvements are bastardised into their own proprietary kernels.
How is it proprietary? Care to elaborate further?
Dave wrote:
However – there is most certainly vendor lock in – if I want to run Oracle on Linux and get support i’m *forced* to run it on Redhat or Suse. That is NOT healthy.
Uhm your running a very expensive propietary application, What’s a thousand bucks compared to a 40k database? Good grief, get your priorities straight.
Rayiner Hashem wrote:
RedHat is 100% open source code.
According to the guy that started Whitebox linux:
“Red Hat DID NOT build RHEL3 from the published srpms. Period, end of story”
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/news.html
Try again?
cendrizzi wrote:
I think ubuntu will put some real pressure under fedora in the upcoming year, we’ll see.
Ubuntu _may_ put pressure on fedora/windows/osx as a desktop alternative, but I have some trepidation concerning Ubuntu in the same breath as RHEL. Time will tell.
I have always liked the sensible defaults employed in RH products. Sensible defaults make the distro for me, one of the reasons that as much as I like apt and the debian maintainer’s attention to installation detail (albeit mostly in perl <cough>) I get bored rewriting comfortable defaults eg like a framebuffer console or color ls –but that’s a debian rant and this about Redhat. RH’s inconsistent adminstration tool of the day (linuxconf/ncurses/gtk/pygtk) has been bothersome at times (one in particular concerns a gdm foulup), but python rocks, so I’m happy.
It’s expensive supporting each vendor. That’s the whole reasoning. Period.
quote: “How is it proprietary? Care to elaborate further?
”
Try installing a redhat optimised kernel on another distro and see what happenes. Especially with all the 2.6 kernel backports, you’d have a lot of problems. Nice to hide with anonymity.
Quote: “Uhm your running a very expensive propietary application, What’s a thousand bucks compared to a 40k database? Good grief, get your priorities straight. ”
That’s beating around the bush. And you know it. If you want to run Oracle on Linux (and want support) you have to run it on Redhat or Suse. That is vendor lock in. You can argue all you like about Oracle being an expensive…that doesn’t change the fact that you’re locked into use Redhat or Suse. Obviously a lot of money and done deals passed between Redhat and Oracle to secure this combination. Redhat is not necessarily the best Linux distribution to run Oracle on from a technical point of view either – but marketing has come into play here.
Dave
and scrolling down futher on http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/news.html ……..
And to clarify, RHEL used the supplied srpms, but they don’t appear to have used them at the same time and on a build environment very close to RHEL itself.
>How is it proprietary? Care to elaborate further?
>>Try installing a redhat optimised kernel on another distro and see what happenes
(This wasent directed at me)
Whats your point? The source code for all of Red Hat’s optimizations are avaliable for anyone to implement.
Is Gentoo proprietary also, since using one of their kernels on my Slackware system would fuck it up
What a load of baloney. Any long term Linux user worth his weight in gold will tell you that that statement is pure and utter baloney. I’d rather Debian that Redhat any day. Period.
I’m a long term Linux user and believe it to be true for many though maybe not all circumstances. Debian certainly is as stable, and runs on more arch’s. But kickstart? anaconda? 3rd party support? feature patches?
However – there is most certainly vendor lock in – if I want to run Oracle on Linux and get support i’m *forced* to run it on Redhat or Suse. That is NOT healthy.
You should really read this link:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7288
It talks about what exactly making an enterprise distro is and what they do. Don’t blame RH for doing it cause they can afford it, bitch at your distro cause they couldn’t afford it.
Also, Redhat runs exceptionally heavily modified kernels – Backporting items from a 2.6 kernel…
better to go to a 2.6 kernel…
When RHEL 3 hit its release date 2.6 kernel was not even out yet if I recall correctly, It might have been out something like a week and thats not something I’d put into my “enterprise” distro. As you can see SuSe did that and already are the only enterprise distro hit by the iptables crash bug this week.
Redhat are milking 2.6 kernel enhancements/features without realistically giving back improvements, as the improvements are bastardised into their own proprietary kernels.
Uh oh, I’ve been wasting my time havent I?
Redhat has been known to ship cutting edge packages that are simply broken. Remember the GCC stuff years back? That said, many other distros are guilty of the same issue.
GCC issue.. do you remember why it was shipped, or just that it “broke” things? It was broken cause it relied about C++ code being an ansi standard. something gcc had failed to do up into that point. The fact is, previous GCC releases actually _needed_ you to write BROKEN code for it to work. I think it was a great time for linux’s history as a respectable platform. Linux was getting into mainstream, and conforming to standards was proof of it.
“Is Gentoo proprietary also, since using one of their kernels on my Slackware system would fuck it up”
lol I was thinking the same thing.
infuriating simlification…the other side of callig all linux sistems just linux instead of Gnu/Linux = Linux/Gnu. Maybe in this light we can understand (the a bit annoying on this subject) Richard Stallman…
Run Slack on several hundred servers at work, a few RH servers, and a few Gentoo also. Do I cringe sometimes when having to deal with the RH servers? You bet. Do I yell & curse RH when I encounter kernel issues due to their non-vanilla kernels or other RH nuances?? Oh yeah I do.
But fug, I support the hell out of RH and think they’re an awesome company with a great productservice. If I find it doesn’t suit my needs, well, I use a different distro. Simple. Vendor lock-in? C’mon… Companies cannot officially support the myriad of distros is existance, just like the game coders cannot support every OS around. Their first priority is getting on the dominant systems to stay in business. Nothing wrong with that.
There’s nothing stopping any other distro from achieving the success RH has attained and gaining market share.
Kudos to RH for what they do!!
hah.. i wish i had redhat’s marketing power.
to simply package some software together and charge too much for it just to get their damn logo is insane.. what a great way to make money.. oh wait their stock price is inflated.
DAMN IT, why did i have to sell my apple and redhat stock in trade for sun and novell? we learn from our mistakes, and companies that are paying money for this OS in bulk will learn there are cheaper alternatives than just having the red hat brand
anyway.. people used to get pissed when you didn’t refer it as ” RED HAT GNU/LINUX” some people refer to a computer as simply ‘windows’
i mean, damn, most distros have to have special rpms or debs or whatever for each distro. Red hat is no different but it’s still a lock-in somewhat which is sun’s major criticism which is weird since everyone else appears to do it (i do love sun).
crazy crazy world.. btw I run “red hat enterprise linux”
i do not think they would get 75% if you included sun cobalt linux, which is dead .. among servers (says netcraft..)
stupid cobalt decision they should have used the admin software and used it on other boxes
ok, they can lock you into using suse, redhat, slackware, debian, yellowdog, solaris, windows, freebsd, netbsd, openbsd, dargonflybsd, mandrake linux, gentoo linux, trustix linux, etc etc.
oh wait, they would never support that many OS’s.. too expensive..
It seems that other Linux distros will have to be more compatible with the linux distros that have more marketshare, its how most industry standards are formed.
red hat dosen’t really want industry standards especially when you can’t burn a copy of red hat enterprise linux legally (unless if you strip their copyrights and logos). they WANT you to be locked in so that you MUST use their OS because it IS the leading linux distribution. But what company wouldn’t? If I owned red hat I would sure as hell want that and i would use it as a marketing technique. thank the lord they have whitebox and CentOS.. but no it’s not allowed to say that your running red hat enterprise linux if u installed those OS’s which are basicly the same because it would violate red hat’s trademark..
but if you had a customer that dosen’t know much about OS’s and all they heard from the unix side is ” red hat enterprise linux” wouldn’t you think they woudl choose the provider that used red hat enterprise instead of some unkown distro to them like debian (they may think its unkown)
I tend to run debian and debian based distros on my personal machines because that’s my personal preference. I can only give the highest props to redhat though — they do produce a damn fine distro. I’m just not crazy about rpms. I do get tired of people bashing RH simply because they are doing well; as if it is “selling out” to make a successful product.
Fedora is nice. I like redhat cuz its easy. When I just wanna get something done I use RedHat and Slackware, but I wanna learn Debian too. Gentoo probably takes too long to compile for most simple tasks, but its interesting. But Mandrake has been kinda buggy for me and SuSE still doesn’t seem as nice as RedHat for giving me free downloads to try out. It was very polished the last time I checked it out tho. But I haven’t yet seen Ubuntu and some of the others, so who knows. I still would rather have my own thing… just takes time compiling all this source.. soon the binary management system will be complete.
> “Red Hat DID NOT build RHEL3 from the published srpms. Period, end of story”
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/news.html
Update:
This problem has disappeared when rebuilding on White Box itself. And to clarify, RHEL used the supplied srpms, but they don’t appear to have used them at the same time and on a build environment very close to RHEL itself. Which is why they have so many missing build dependencies, their build host had them installed so they never knew about the dependencies. This is one problem White Box hopes to solve, by providing a distribution known to be able to build itself ON itself.
RH locks you in with its guis’ and config tools that are available only on RH systems. This is fine if you’re only using redhat. The issue is you never really learn how things work so you can move or integrate another Linux system because you “need” those gui tools. Its like windows.
When Linux started to get noticed back in the RedHat 5 days , RedHat packaged the distro so people with 56k wouldnt have to wait..That really helped them gain prominece. I know I enjoyed the “Free to Distribute” part of my 20-30 dollar donation to RedHat.
If you want RHEL check out “Whitebox Linux”. Its compiled from the RHEL source tree. If thats not proof enought that RH is still open source I dunno what is.There was a time when all you had was the source code and it was B.Y.O.B (Build Your Own Binary.)
-nX
This is a lockin that does not exist. RedHat’s products are support and service. If your company wants to go it alone, your company can choose any of the hundreds of Linux flavors that are out there. If your company would rather pay $300-$500 per year per license to RedHat and let them fix things, then that’a another choice. The history of enterprise software tells us that organizations typically prefer the latter route.
Adolescent Linux enthusiasts may judge Linux distributions based on packaging schemes and the ability to rip CD’s. They may judge distributions based on access to the latest point releases or the most themes. Whatever. All this is irrelevant in the enterprise world. There, software needs to do the job, not break, and stay that way for as long as possible.
Finally, someone whined about RH going out of its way to make sure it works with Oracle. Would you really imagine that RH would not ensure that its major customers could use its OS to run Oracle? How is that wrong? How does that produce lockin? Do you think organizations spending six and 7 figure sums on software really want to wait until the check is chased to see if it works?
The rest of people seems to be able to verify that RedHat is doing a pretty good job releasing software they own under free software licenses, contributing back to free software projects, and spearheading some of them.
It’s hard to compete with that, so some marketing departments try to come up with ways to show that black is white, free software locks you in, and all that. That’s just the same old Microsoft FUD juice in new bottles.
cheers,
dalibor topic
Stop with looking for reasons to bash RedHat.
They write more GPL software than any other Linux distro, This is not up for debate It is simply fact. Okay, Debian gave us apt-get, SuSe now relesed YaSt under GPL, but these are simply dwarfed by the major projects RedHat has undertaken/bought out, and still has bigger plans with the Stateless Linux project.
#2 Try and remember how other companies act before comparing RedHat. You want to complain about some kernel patches? Doesn’t anyone remember what a REAL lock-in is? Look to Redmond. Nothing free as in beer, no source, patents block from writing compatible systems, etc. Compare this with RH who has been forked into Mandrake and Whitebox outright and didn’t make a peep about it. Hell, they even host the fedora-legacy mirrors for people who don’t want to keep up. with quick releases or pay for software.
I think maybe the fight people really have is with Capitalism not with RedHat.
Have you looked at the current kernel development model? You need redhat and other companies to provide modified kernels. The kernel developers have made it entirely clear that stability is not job one anymore. I’ve had production kernels since the 2.6.0 release go from bad to worse as each DOT release comes out. You need companies like redhat to pick apart the BS and make a solid kernel.
Lock-in my ass. If I wanna take out entire production application environment and move it from solaris to redhat to debian I can. I could do it in a couple days. This guy is high. Redhat (even EL) is opensource software and there is no such thing as lock-in with opensource.
Is Redhat the best desktop distro? I dunno, I’ve become less and less happy with gnome as time goes on and really still think that the fluidity I get from windows XP on the same hardware is much more impressive than what I see in gnome (or kde for that matter). I don’t think there is a ‘best’ desktop distro out there right now but if I had to guess I’d say SUSE. Sever based distro? I’d say its pretty close between Redhat and Debian. I am going to go with debian for our new production environment. Hopefully sarge will hit production before then.
Redhat so far, has been very supportive of the open source community.
I think most of the posts here stem from the fact that everyone has a preference, and really, it is the same software.
RedHat, to my knowledge anyway, isn’t supplying anything they cannot legally source to code that is public BSD or GNU licensed.
I think it is great to have a whole ton of distros. Really not that hard to do. Building a distro is really a time investment not a real skill issue, IMHO anyway.
Everyone has a preference. However I can tell you what currently bugs me about distro’s in general:
1) LSB package management has to get better.
2) If you do take my advice and start another distro, PLEASE support a standard package management service. My preference is RPM, but if you want to do the gentoo emerge thing or the apt get debian thing by all means.
Just try and emulate the /etc configs like the parent distro’s package management service.
3) LSB has to work harder I think to be more specific about package management.
I think Linux REALLY does need ONLY ONE package management service. Why?
Well, to deal with security for example, it would be nice to have a set of humans working on a security patch, and realease it once…instead of having a lot of distro maintainers repeating the effort to come up with a patch for thier package manager.
This of course, can be said of many issues facing Linux source code in general.
It seems to me this could solve an enourmous amount of invested labor if, for example we never agree on perhaps a single linux distro, fine. But everyone uses a single package manager and LSB specifications for /etc layout that are more detailed would be nice too.
I would like to add Roses blooming in the winter time too.
🙂
-gc
im sort of find with that since IIRC redhat employs more kernel hackers than any other distro company (and i am not meaning just inhouse kernel hackers, i am meaning people like alan cox).
as far as building the srpms, the fedora project is helping to alieviate'(sp?) issues with that.
personally i would use redhat in the enterprise (and have at my previous employer) and not think twice about it. it isnt that i feel they are the only solution provider, but i like what all they give to the community that they didnt have to (like kudzu, and like i predict they will do with the DS stuff they recently aquired). also the one time i had to call support over something i got an answer quickly (since then i found a local small business to do the support, one of the most knowledgable linux users i have ever met if not the most knowledgeable, and he prefers redhat/fedora when it comes to his customers. he has several package submissions to the fedora project.)
i have tried other distros, even gave debian a full month, but came back to rh/fedora. debian broke courtesy an apt-get upgrade one day (no i wasnt using bleeding edge packages, but i wasnt using “stable” packages either. i am not saying this is normal for debian, only that the project is ran by humans and that i wasnt the only one that happened to according to #debian on the irc network i regular).
what i hate to see are the people who go off on you for using redhat/fedora. they should be happy someone is using linux IMO, but instead because they arent using debian, slack, gentoo, or any other “kewl” distro they wont stfu about it. it is about the same between linux distros as it is between the linux and bsd camps. the zealots cant just be happy you are using *random OS/FS platform* because it isnt *other random OS/FS platform*.
like rh/fedora? more power to you. use it. enjoy it.
like gentoo/debian/ubuntu/slack/fbsd/obsd/nbsd/whatever? more power to you. use it. enjoy it.
“What a load of baloney. Any long term Linux user worth his weight in gold will tell you that that statement is pure and utter baloney. I’d rather Debian that Redhat any day. Period.
Fine go with pure Debian. Debian has a lot of advantages (apt-get, high quality, lot’s of packages).
But I’m getting a bit tired of Debian snobbery out there. The same goes for Gentoo and Slackware.
Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware are good distros for a very small, specialized audience: Highly technical, highly Linux knowledgable, “leet” users who probably have way too much time on their hands, and want to prove to the world their “geek elite coolness”. These users then disparage distros like Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Xandros, Mepis, because they’re “too easy”. Sorry, I don’t mean to flame. But the Debian elitism just gets annoying.
Pure Debian typically takes a lot of time to install and heavy tweaking of config files to get working satisfactorily.
Gentoo takes up to 3 days to install. Who has 3 days to install a freaking operating system? I sure don’t. No way in hell am I going to waste 3 days of my life installing an operating system, just to get a teensie bit extra performance, or “to learn how things work better”.
Slackware is minimalist, and typically takes a lot of tweaking, and typically requires a very knowledgable user.
Now all that said, I would not say that Fedora Core is the best or most stable Linux distro. But I would say that RHEL has a great reputation for stability.
And IMHO, part of the job of the distro is to make Linux easier, to make it more accessible. That’s why I think distros like Mandrake and Mepis are so great. They’ve gone that extra mile to make the system easy to install and use. They don’t require a highly technical user. But they feature plenty of stuff under the hood for the highly technical user to play with (it’s still GNU/Linux after all). In that vain, Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware get an “incomplete”.
“That’s beating around the bush. And you know it. If you want to run Oracle on Linux (and want support) you have to run it on Redhat or Suse. That is vendor lock in. You can argue all you like about Oracle being an expensive…that doesn’t change the fact that you’re locked into use Redhat or Suse. Obviously a lot of money and done deals passed between Redhat and Oracle to secure this combination. Redhat is not necessarily the best Linux distribution to run Oracle on from a technical point of view either – but marketing has come into play here.”
It’s not Red Hat or SuSE that are forcing the “lock in”, it’s Oracle, plus other distros that are not spending the money or time to get Oracle certification. So don’t point the finger at Red Hat or SuSE for trying to lock people in. They should not be blamed for supporting enterprise class database software.
>What a load of baloney. Any long term Linux user worth his
>weight in gold will tell you that that statement is pure and
>utter baloney. I’d rather Debian that Redhat any day. Period
It seems you confused the term “linux user” with zealot here.
“I tend to run debian and debian based distros on my personal machines because that’s my personal preference. I can only give the highest props to redhat though — they do produce a damn fine distro. I’m just not crazy about rpms. I do get tired of people bashing RH simply because they are doing well; as if it is “selling out” to make a successful product.”
Here’s a great example of a totally non-snobbish Debian user. He uses it because he likes it, and makes no disparaging remarks against other distros like Red Hat. Big kudos to Father Baker.
The notion of a lock-in is completely stupid. So does Macromedia lock you into using just win/mac? Go use something else for your os. So what if Oracle doesn’t support other Linux OS’s? I wouldn’t either if I knew that there were 1000+1 distros out there that may be slightly different and I couldn’t support every feature with the highest standards of quality. And I wouldn’t tweak a damn thing for a super small user base. Go wine to Oracle, not Red Hat…what a wuss.
I’m mad that macromedia won’t port all of their tools to Linux….oh wait, nevermind, I guess I can’t be. Flex is damn cool.
how many suckers does it take to advocate white-male-corporate-oppression?
What is the author smoking? What lock-in are they talking about? RedHat is 100% open source code. Let me repeat that for those who missed it. RedHat is 100% open source code.
Totally agree. If Red Hat has a very large market share, well then all power to them. They’re using 100% open source (GPL’d wherever possible) software, and they’re using a fantastic competitive tool. We’re open source, we use nothing but open source software and if anyone thinks they can do better with it then bring it on.
I give Red Hat maximum respect for their total open source/GPL’d software stance. With their new J2EE solution they’re going for established community components like Tomcat and Jonas. They’re not mucking about with idiotic companies like JBoss (who are bitching like Sun about Red Hat, incidentally) in the way that Novell/Suse are doing. Red Hat have quite wisely ironed exactly what their focus is, and that is bringing 100% open source software together for organisations to use out of the box.
And Novell/Suse’s both source strategy. Crap. Once you do that you’ve lost focus on what you’re putting your development effort into and you start being very vulnerable to 100% open source software. What is it that we actually sell? Red Hat have gone about this in the best possible way.
I think the reason for the lock-in argument is this:
The company is so dominant that it’s not uncommon to hear less savvy executives simply refer to the distro as “Linux,” which infuriates many.
Red Hat still has a huge amount of mind share, and that’s why people think of them. It is going to be up to someone else to break that mindshare and use open source software better than Red Hat do.
Hey – unlike with Microsoft, it is possible for companies to do that.
According to the guy that started Whitebox linux:
“Red Hat DID NOT build RHEL3 from the published srpms. Period, end of story”
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/news.html
Try again?
I seriously suggest you to read a page till the end before posting some stuff like this. He later discovered that he cannot simply take RHEL source and build it on Red Hat Linux 9, but instead he needs to bootstrap with the correct glibc, gcc … version.
Obviously a lack of experience in bootstrap is the problem here and not Red Hat using proprietary components. He could as well as claiming Red Hat Linux 9 itself is using proprietary components, if he tried to build it using SuSE Linux.
And it is also a good practice to check for the reasonability of a claim before to make it yours. That means not simply take any claim that just fits into your preconception.
Go to a bookstore. Look around. How many books do you see dealing with linux,especially RedHat?
The vast amount of documentation *dealing* with RedHat explains Redhat’s sucess and why script-kiddie distros like Slackware either got dumped or aren’t gaining ground against Redhat.
The vast,vast majority of people *LIKE* Redhat. That’s why they are sucessful.
You can argue all you like about Oracle being an expensive…that doesn’t change the fact that you’re locked into use Redhat or Suse. Obviously a lot of money and done deals passed between Redhat and Oracle to secure this combination. Redhat is not necessarily the best Linux distribution to run Oracle on from a technical point of view either – but marketing has come into play here.
Or maybe Oracle just picked the companies that have the most mature and professional approach to developing and supporting their OSes ?
Just because something doesn’t happen the way you think it should doesn’t mean there’s a grand conspiracy.
The issue is you never really learn how things work so you can move or integrate another Linux system because you “need” those gui tools. Its like windows.
Untrue. You learn how things work *on RHEL*. There is no “one true way” – you should always use the tools that the vendor provides whenever possible, because not doing so results in a maintainability nightmare. There are few things more frustrating than inheriting a system where the previous admin has done everything “his own way” instead of using the perfectly good supplied tools and standards (usually because they were “too easy” or “not the way I do it”).
A note to all you 1337 h4x0rs out there – Redhat provides all those admin tools, filesystem standards, etc to make their platform *consistent*. This is to make their product attractive to companies by making admins for their platforms easier to identify and more plentiful. This is one of the reasons they are a popular choice amongst enterprises.