The first thing anyone considering using Fedora needs to know is this is not a safe, sane Linux distribution. It’s not meant to be. Fedora is the test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is also the replacement for Red Hat Linux, with two major differences: there is no commercial edition, and it is intended to be a community project, rather than solely a Red Hat product. Read the rest of the review at LinuxPlanet.
Fedora Core 3: Cruising The Bleeding Edge
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“Fedora still comes with only the ext2/ext3 filesystems. Yes, you can add ReiserFS, XFS, or JFS, but you’ll need to re-compile the kernel to add support for them. It’s shortsighted to not include support for these other filesystems in any case; many users have multi-boot systems, so being able to mount and read these other filesystems is essential.
”
the article is not indepth and full of incorrect assumptions like the above.
some filesystems like reiserfs do not support extended attributes and hence will not work cleanly with selinux which fedora enables and integrates by default so having this filesystems supported would mean applying patches with the developers like hans reiser strictly object to.
ext3 has had extensive speed improvements and online resizing and large disks support. when asked why they needed other filesystems in redhat beta list everyone admitted they didnt really have a compelling reason.
redhat is a small company. there is only so much that they can support actively
That’s not the only inaccuracy about that quote. I’m using FC3 with XFS right now and I didn’t have to do any recompiling. You just run the installer with “linux xfs” (or “linux reiserfs” or “linux jfs”…) at the prompt.
> Alan Cox posted an explanation, but not a fix.
Fixed in kernel-2.6.9-1.698_FC3 (currently in testing).
rpm -q –changelog :
* jeu déc 02 2004 Dave Jones <[email protected]>
– ide: Handle early EOF on CDs.
It’s not a Fedora only bug.
> Fedora still comes with only the ext2/ext3 filesystems.
Wrong.
For reiserfs, use “selinux=0 reiserfs”.
jfs use “selinux=0 jfs”.
xfs use “xfs”.
rpm -q -l -p kernel | egrep “/((reiserfs)|(xfs)|(jfs)).*.ko”
/lib/modules/2.6.9-1.698_FC3/kernel/fs/jfs/jfs.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.9-1.698_FC3/kernel/fs/reiserfs/reiserfs.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.9-1.698_FC3/kernel/fs/xfs/xfs.ko
so what. its a woman who is running this site too. we dont need to bash them, neither do we need to give them special prevalages when doing a review. I didnt even bother to look up the name.
Bahaha! Tell me your kidding!
“redhat is a small company. there is only so much that they can support actively”
P-L-E-A-S-E-! Redhat a small company?! They make more money than the entire GDP of some small countries!
<<P-L-E-A-S-E-! Redhat a small company?! They make more money than the entire GDP of some small countries!>>
Um no.
“A surge in new sales helped Red Hat, the top seller of the Linux operating system, to a net income of $5 million and revenue that grew 43 percent to $37 million for its most recent quarter.”
http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5178057.html
Ano(IP: 61.95.184.—) is right, cut Red Hat some slack.
At work, I had the chance to get my RHCT a 4 day
long course, on the first day, the instructor handed
out Redhat RHEL3 Workstation. I built a new computer
Soyo board, AMD 2800, 512 memory and so on for it.
After installing, I quickly found out, Enterprise is
boring, no packages available for anything. Then I wiped
it out, and I installed Fedora Core 3. Not to bad,
at least it has some multi-media, a new kernel,
and some functionality. RHEL3 for a Enterprise software
had more bugs it seemed to me than Fedora does.
One thing that is a pain in FedoraC3 is the CD rom
dismount bug in KDE, Gnome it works fine. Other than
that, it is actually interesting, compared to RHEL3
that was like a striped down version of Linux.
the reviewer says:
* A heavily-patched 2.6.9 kernel (currently 2.6.9-1.667). Note that Red Hat always modifies kernels extensively; this is not unusual.
Fedora Core kernels track the mainline very closely.
Here is a quote from Dave Jones from Red Hat:
We’re now at ~200 patches on top of mainline. I used to be quite
proud of being only 40 csets away from mainline, however, that was
when we were tracking upstream on a daily basis. As we’re not
doing that right now, we’re essentially pulling in selective parts
of the upstream snapshots, so I don’t feel its quite so bad as
having 200 or so ‘feature’ patches that aren’t upstream.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-December/msg00…
Another review for fedora
can we have something new ?????
congratulations! myself i have been looking forward to this most significant release for the last 3 years! scalability is the primary jewel in this crown! the other technologies are just icing on the sugar.
i’m looking forward to replacing my development and server systems with a well designed(1), well understood(2), stable(3) platform(4).
(1) – by design, with fore-planning, discussed and hammered out, with academic papers discussing the pros and cons and detailing operating characteristics. not adhoc “patchy” designs and growth a la other OSS OSes.
(2) – see (1). and also the developers and experts can focus one *one* distribution. and in my opinion, the developers are much more insightful, much more academic, much more considered, much more expeert, and less the one-night script-kiddies from other OSes. with significant core developers with links to real and difficult projects such as embedded projects and real-time projects, this is a pleasure and a privilege. and they’re friendly – and helpful ifyou ask nicely.
(3) see (1) and (2). importanlt, the APIs are stable comapred to other OSS OSes. you can be sure that you will be working on a platform that doesn’t keep shifting the goal posts within the lifecyles of larger projects. oh, and stable as in “graceful under stress” / “uptime” too.
(4) see (1), (2), (3), (4). its a platform. its the promise of BSD as abse for your work, your project, your product. its the core and tools for building what you want out of it.
now if only the new logo could have taken into account some of the well known design principle and visual language and icons to represent what NetBSD is all about … it seems they went for the least offensive, rather than the most purposeful logo. oh well – its not too bad, the shape and form are well done and i guess it doess reflect the low-publicity attribute of netbsd.
I’m glad I didn’t waste my time reading the article. Any “journalist” who can’t be bothered to do basic fact checking doesn’t deserve much of a fair shake if you ask me. This is just another person throwing a CD in and clicking next 20 times then writing about it. Someone who knows Fedora inside and out (or any distro) would be much appreciated though.
Did you ever get that feeling that something isn’t like the way it was anymore? I have this feeling about Fedora. I used to like Red Hat Linux distributions so much… I used to love that reddie box, all fashioned and consumer supported. I bought the version 9.0 – it was so cool. I understand all means and goals Fedora exists to achieve, but it doesn’t feel like the good ole days… I feel a little bit disturbed when people shove in our faces that “it´s the latest, untested, wacky and crazy stuff” so that it can be a base for RHEL. Who wants to be testing beta software for ages? Not me. Well, Fedora might be a good try, but I still feel like missing the ole Red Hat Linux from before. 🙂
Two words :
– Try Fedora
I just unplugged my 3com 3c905b and replaced it with a Realtek RTL-8169 gigabit card, and it was totally plug’n’play – I didn’t need to configure anything, or do anything with kuzdu, it just works!
Not bad for a card that doesn’t even work on Win2K (and requires a driver floppy to work in XP!)
Fedora is no more a beta for RHEL 4 than RH 9 was a beta for RHEL3. Red Hat 9 broke for some people, so does Fedora, so does every other distro out there. They all have bugs, it doesn’t make them all “beta” and buggy.
i would have thought the whole point of a testing distro like fc would be to get rid of all the legal noncense that stoped all the codecs being installed, last time i played with it i was at a loss where the stuff i wanted was
oh and if you think FC is beeding edge you should try some of the stuff we get upto over at gentoo, ive pretty much run out of new stuff to play with now reiser4 is stable for most stuff unless on amd64.
i have absolutly no prob running buggy stuff if i install it but redhat used to be a nice out the box solution for average users, i guess not anymore
By and far, this was the easiest installation of Linux ever. Heck, it was easier than my last 2 Windows installations. DVD/MP3 capabilites were easily added, and things just worked.
And it runs like a dream on my AMD64 3200+. This review just seemed way off. I didn’t read it all the way through, but a few of the parts I read were just plain wrong.
Basically, I am very, very happy with Core 3: it’s fast, it’s easy, and it works.
See the subject. Can we say that sourceforge is a-not-serious-server or beta-server?
I would use Fecora Core 3 if it didn’t have so many default services enabled. I would also like to see a fully NATed iptables config by default that filters EVERYTHING. FC3 is really getting close to what I would use. Keep up the good work.
That has been discussed so many times that is boring now. If they dont want to put it, it is okay. IT IS THE LAW.
>>oh and if you think FC is beeding edge you should try some of the stuff we get upto over at gentoo, ive pretty much run out of new stuff to play with now reiser4 is stable for most stuff unless on amd64.
Hmmm, I dont about that. I use gentoo, but I cannot say that it is more cutting edge than Fedora. I dont think it will be. Both are stable, but Fedora is less stable, because they then to take more risks trying new stuff. If something doesnt work in gentoo, inmediately is added to the package.mask.
I am sad to say that this review is written not only by someone from my city…but who has written for the local computer rag. I gave up on her writing a long time ago. This review pretty sums up why I did.
Before you guys starting whining and complaining I’m troll etc etc…. I just want to state that I have been an active Redhat supporter since version 4.2.
3 days ago I decided that I would remove redhat 9.0 on my system and finally give Fedora Core a try (FC3). I read many threads in various forums about the good points and the bad points about Fedora but I decided I’d give it a try to find out for myself what is was like. Well…. I have top say I am very very dissapointed in the direction Fedora is going (or should I say Redhat). The installation was no brainer and pretty much the same as since version 8 of Redhat but after that it was all downhill. I’m not going to go into the details of what I disliked but lets just say I was glad to get it off my system and replace it with Gentoo.
Gentoo imho has to be the best distro I have ever used and I am a true convert now
I hope Fedora (Redhat) can turn around and get back the support it once had. Unfortunately I don’t think that is going to happen and instead we are going to slowly see the numbers reduce as time goes by. I know many redhat supporters are moving or have moved away from Redhat/Fedora.
> I know many redhat supporters are moving or have moved away from Redhat/Fedora.
You know this ?
Not me.
Redhat like most ‘traded’ companies have to perform
for the investors. They found out that with ‘free’
software it is hard to bring in all the cash. So
they are doing what Microsoft gets bashed for now
selling licenses on their software. No more free-rides
and Fedora may soon run out of gas in the future.
I installed RHEL3 Workstation, only to be wiped out
for Fedora because of lack of multi-media and bugs.
The kernel was 2.4 and it was no different than
Redhat 9 minus a lot of packages. Plus, they want
$300 for the standard RHEL3 workstation package.
To me it makes no sense to pay for something that
is dated, freely available to download, and with
no packages such as apt-get available for it. I found
one but it was useless.
Redhat may be making short term money, investors
are happy, but like everything else, it will come
down in the end.
> So they are doing what Microsoft gets bashed for now selling licenses on their software.
No. For support
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/eval/
Since Red Hat Desktop is open source and licensed under the GPL, you can continue to use the core product code after the evaluation period; however, your access to Red Hat Network will be turned off after 30 days.
To: By my_name
Yes I do…. 5 people alone who sat the RHCE with me have moved away from RedHat. In my local LUG RedHat was the distribution of choice for install fests, now they are opting for other distro’s as they people don’t want Fedora or just doesn’t seem as popular.
You only have to read a number of other forums to see the same thing being said. This forum is just one of them. The numbers aren’t huge and thats not what I said. Just the fact people are moving away from Redhat/Fedora is a tell tale sign that things aren’t as good as what they used to be ESPECIALLY if loyal supports are leaving.
I think Redhat will start doing what all
other companies do, once they start making
money the freebies stop (Fedora) and they
focus on license fees and charging for
support all the time for any problems.
Then it will be just another company
selling a product. Then only to either
grow or be absorb and bought out by a
larger Corporation.
If you want to use Fedora you need about 512
memory and a AMD Athlon or P4 processor to
get it to run with any speed in X-windows.
It still is kinda slugish compared to Windows XP
Professional on the same box.
> 5 people
It’s a big number.
June 17, 2004 :
http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2004/press_q1f12005.html
Sales of subscriptions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux continued to outpace the growth rate of the Intel-based server market, reaching 98,000 subscriptions in the first quarter, a sequential increase of 13%. This is comprised of 75,000 subscriptions sold into the enterprise IT market and 23,000 subscriptions sold into the HPC and hosting markets.
September 20, 2004 :
http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2004/press_q2fy2005.html
Sales of subscriptions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux reached 144,000 units, including:
* 115,000 subscriptions to enterprise IT servers, which includes new subscriptions and renewals.
* 29,000 new subscriptions to HPC/hosting marketplace and desktops.
<<Redhat like most ‘traded’ companies have to perform
for the investors.>>
And to perform well, they need an excellent product. They create an excellent product by taping into the resources of the OSS community. The community gets an easy to use, bleeding edge, community distro and Red Hat gets more developers and beta testers, for software that not only benefits RH, but the rest of the Linux community aswell.
<<They found out that with ‘free’
software it is hard to bring in all the cash.>>
Lets see, RH has surpassed the market analyists predictions for revenue growth for the last 3Qs. They are doing something right, I think.
<<So
they are doing what Microsoft gets bashed for now
selling licenses on their software.>>
First, there are no licenses for Fedora. Second, people dislike MS because they have gone beyond the criteria of “fair competition” and have done their best to eradicate their competion, many times through illegal means. Also, perhaps the fact that MS has $60,000,000,000 in the bank yet continues to fail at creating a decent product.
<<No more free-rides
and Fedora may soon run out of gas in the future. >>
The Fedora community is NOT part of Red Hat. It was established by RH but is now under the control of a COMMUNITY.
<<
I installed RHEL3 Workstation, only to be wiped out
for Fedora because of lack of multi-media and bugs.>>
Your complaining about multimedia support for an enterprise product? I didn’t know your employer wanted you to waste your day listening to MP3s and watching *.avi of “hot teen babes”.
Which bugs are you referring to? Since this is RHEL, did you call in for support and ask for help?
———
2ND POST
———
<<I think Redhat will start doing what all
other companies do, once they start making
money the freebies stop (Fedora)>>
Once again, Fedora is maintained by a community. RH cannot discontue Fedora and why would they want to? RH has been an outstanding member of the OSS community.
<<
Then it will be just another company
selling a product. >>
Last time I checked, RH made their money from support.
<<Then only to either
grow or be absorb and bought out by a
larger Corporation.>>
From the caliber of your posts, you seem to know very little of the economics of OSS, please explain your theory further.
<<
If you want to use Fedora you need about 512
memory and a AMD Athlon or P4 processor to
get it to run with any speed in X-windows.>>
Strange I was running FC3 on a P3 700Mhz / 256MB machine and it ran fine.
<<It still is kinda slugish compared to Windows XP
Professional on the same box.>>
Oh yes WinXP….released almost 5yrs ago
fc3 doesn’t need a speed box. I’m running it on everything from a p3@700 256mb ram to a amd64 3200 1GB ram and every box i uses runs fine, granted the amd64 is faster
People aren’t running from rh/fedora, more people could be trying other distro’s since we are up to around 350 or so. Who cares, plenty of people use it and if you spent anytime on the umpteen mailing list for fedora/redhat you would know there is a huge user base.
RH AS 3.0 sucked on my desktop. Ok, well run it on your server and see what you think, your not paying for a pretty license. Your paying for support.
As my_name pointed out, RHAS/EL is getting bigger and bigger, and Fedora 3 is really a great piece of work, can’t wait for FC4. I’m already on rawhide again w/ another box
I would use Fecora Core 3 if it didn’t have so many default services enabled.
It’s fairly simple to turn them off.On debian it’s simply “update-rc -f portmap remove”.This way it the portmap service isn’t started anymore at boot.However the deamon still runs and can be stopped right away with “/etc/init.d portmap stop”.While i don’t know much about Fedora i can imagine it’s pretty well possible to do the same on FC in one way or another.Ideal situtation:>nothing listening<
Starting nmap 3.55 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-12-10 09:02 CET
All 1660 scanned ports on tobaccofarm (127.0.0.1) are: closed
note:unlike windows where allways something is listening.
Nmap run completed — 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.384 seconds
[X@X user]$
However i have sometimes the cups deamon on and it listenens
on port 631 which is blocked by the firewall as you see:
Shorewall:fw2all:DROP:IN= OUT=eth0 SRC=XXX.168.X.X DST=X.X.1.255 LEN=174 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=175 DF PROTO=UDP *SPT=631* DPT=631 LEN=154
So the listening services that run in the default state might not be a fair reason not to use or try an OS,they can all be shut down untill you need them,and still enable you to surf ,instant message, irc,bittorrent,whatever.The less services are running less can be attacked.
Any article appearing in a blatantly anti-Linux site
that still display flash adds about “Microsoft vs Linux”.
From the word go – does not reserve any minimal respect.
I got all my friends to boycott that shitty site a while ago.
Hope I don’t have to start boycotting OSNews for supporting them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3600724.stm
There is one thing a site being Microsoft-focused,
I don’t have a problem with that.
There is another a site being anti-Linux or worse disgustingly double-faced.
I stopped reading this article when I read the words “does just fine”.
Why??
Because it was the end of the article, except for the “Resources” paragraph? When are people going to get tired of using very “painful in the posterior” cliches.
The other thing I want to gargle about, is all the “heavy” armchair critics. Please give the authors of the articles a break sometimes. How many of you have actually published an article online to be criticised by uber-geeks, that like to make a dramatic episode out of any inaccurary??
Enough said : “May the bridges burn behind me !”
I have nothing against ocjective journalism whatever the outcome of a investigation or research might be.In my opinion people who mislead others with twisted numbers and graphs are just as bad as the narrow minded whatever anti they are against sites.However boycotting those wouldn’t do any good to the situation.It wouldn’t diasapear over night because you boycot it.Better yet to fight against it and trying to present facts and or knowledge in a way that respects other OS’s.Some don’t understand that their behaviour only makes their favorite OS looking bad,so they only get the opposite effect of what they had in mind.So to be honest i should have omitted
“note:unlike windows where allways something is listening. ”
Although i had no anti intentions in mind at the time i wrote it,the impression might arise i did,my bad.
My ambition is not to get people to migrate to Linux.
Please keep to your XP’s ME’s 2003’s
But my fear is the pressure Microsoft is exerting on Linux users – or at preparing to.
Patents is one side of the issue.
Recently they tried their best with the FAT format (and failed) – which meant there would be an issue in me using an external HD or a pen drive or an old floppy?
So far I have a lot of freedom on my Linux OS.
Imagine if suddenly I have to pay a license to watch a .wmv file? Imagine if I get a client sending me a word document – and no Linux Office suite is allowed (by law) to open it?
Have you seen a video of Steve Balmer (Gartner Conference) on Linux? The man is a genius when it comes to lieing. It’s hard not to get convinced. Who run the IT deparments for your country, military agencies!, educational offices, and patent office are the “Charlies” that readily buy into that.
Not everyone will be bothered to inspect the facts. Not everyone is as conscientious as you! Too many people find thinking – specially for themselves – a painful process.
The fact is a site “LinuxPlanet” which is visited mostly by Linux newcomers and IT admin running dual OS (perhaps RedHat and Windows) .. start getting campaigns like that. They will be susceptible to the suggestions – it will influence decisions – perhaps on a grander scale.
I am not on a moral crusade – let people keep to your Windows etc. I seriously can’t care less.
Just dont like seeing the ugly tactics employed by MS – buying off Linux websites and the liberal just going:
“well everyone can see the irony of this”
It is serious.
For me migrating to Linux was such a breath of fresh air.
I am so comfortable – it’s like discovering computers all over again – as a kid. I was so frustrated with MS I promised I was never going to touch a PC again; luckily an alternative was presented to me.
Now imagine it wasn’t Linux but OS/2 Warp like before.. all very fine and then everything dies and gets crushed directly/indirectly by MS?
If Linux becomes more and more restricted – the incentives for companies porting their application will vanish.
And for those (not me) wanting Adobe / Macromedia / Corel Draw on Linux – forget it.
For those wanting more games to be ported (definitely me) – lose all hope.
Paranoid as it seems – LinuxPlanet’s FUD advertisements contribute to that. Anyone with respect for – anyone with some pride in their Linux OS shouldn’t support that site.
Can the Gentoo supporters please not hijack every post about anything under the sun….Please?
There’s a nice GUI to manage Fedora services hanging off the Applications menu. Two clicks and you’re there. 🙂
>> it makes no sense to pay for something that
is dated, freely available to download…
For enterprise-scale installations, the cost of the actual OS code is a minimal fraction of the total cost of the entire IT operation. If you are a singleton home user with only one machine, of course, it makes no sense to buy something if you can acquire the equivalent free. Remember, though, that free OS doesn’t get you people who are contractually obligated to support you. And, that’s what enterprise customers want.
Large organization will incur costs to support their IT infrastructure, no matter which OS they use. If they can reduce costs by paying RedHat to provide some of that support, they’re making a good decision.
Yes I’ve written articles and 50% of the time spent writing it was double checking my facts to be assured I didn’t look lazy or ignorant on the topic I’m trying to inform people about.
The gentoo guy.
You can see why people might call you a “troll” right? You can’t just say something sucks then in the same breath “I wont give my reasons” If you want to be critical try telling people why.
Services are no reason to switch distro’s every distro has services on here is what you do on fedora.
chkconfig –list | awk ‘/3:on/ { print $1 }’
That will tell you what services are running.
Here is how you stop them at start-up
/sbin/chkconfig $SERVICE off ($SERVICE being the service you don’t want)
or alternitivly.
for SERVICE in gpm kudzu netfs anacron atd apmd pcmcia nfslock isdn autofs portmap rhnsd
do
/sbin/chkconfig $SERVICE off
/sbin/service $SERVICE stop
done
This will turn off most stuff you don’t want, add or remove what you want.
Redhat is a bigger company that some people here think, the enterprise value is over 3 billion dollars.
“Redhat is a bigger company that some people here think”
no. its not. its has only 700 employees and 3 billions in total capital is peanuts compared to what ibm ms sun et all profit.
I am glad you double-check your facts before posting an article. If everyone were like you this would have been a dull world indeed. The problem is though that most of the people that like to bash other peoples handiwork, almost never positively contribute to the discussion.
The other thing is that people like to visit the comment discussion and most often will find out soon enough where the glaring errors are in the article. I am also glad that you are one of those people that does positively contribute in such a way.
My sympathy is biased towards the guys that try, although they might make a few mistakes in the process. I say this, because I am sure the author of the article did not intend to get some facts wrong and I did see her updated section regarding the filesystems.
Peace to all humankind !
I can’t see any Gentoo supporter here.
Can you?
ah right thought he was debian
no. its not. its has only 700 employees and 3 billions in total capital is peanuts compared to what ibm ms sun et all profit.
Actually 740 according to this http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/presskit/fact_sheet.html
Excluding Novell, Red Hat is perhaps the biggest OSS company.
I must apologize for the Gentoo guy. He didnt give any good reasons to sustain that Gentoo is better than Fedora. His complaints about Fedora are just plain empty. I am a Fedora/Gentoo user. I am a Gentoo user. But saying that Gento o is more cutting edge than Fedora is just not true.
“Excluding Novell, Red Hat is perhaps the biggest OSS company.”
novell isnt a oss company. it also sells proprietary software. redhat is one of the smallest companies in this industry. when it comes to business oss companies are competing in the same space with proprietary companies and competition is cut throat with sun,ms, novell et all.
any claim that redhat is not small is factually incorrect
novell isnt a oss company.
I meant Suse, Novell division. Sorry for not being clear.
RedHat made a big blunder when they made their pricing scheme. Linux was taking the server world by storm, and it was a few years away from taking a big bite out of the desktop market. With Mozilla, OpenOffice, CUPS, and Gnome, Linux was becoming a serious threat. RedHat was Linux to the corporate world. Unfortunately, they buckled to investment pressure and decided to show a huge profit now versus one later. Now death is almost guaranteed.
Imagine a world where RedHat would sell their products for a reasonable price and give users full download support for seven years. How many home desktop copies would RedHat have sold if they charged only $40.00? How many workstations copies would they have sold if they charged only $70 / workstation? How many servers would they have sold if they had charged only $400 for standard and $1200 for enterprise?. They could have easily made their loses through selling in volume and would have come up with similar profits. In addition to making the same amount of money, they would have hurt Sun and Microsoft bad, and they would have had a solid user base that had no intentions of looking for a better alternative. But greed got to them, and now Microsoft is cheaper than “Linux” and Solaris is cheaper than “Linux” too. And for a lot of business, there just isn’t any incentive to use Linux.
What?? Am I leaving in another world. Okay. Redhat went for the money. So what. I see the company stocks growing more than ever. Isnt that why now Sun is attacking Redhat. The thing is we are used to the free stuff. At least I know that I am. I am not the only one. I worked for a National Lab, they have the resources and as soon as Redhat changed their policies they change the product. Let them make money. There are so many choices out there. Stop this dreaming stuff. I will say it again. Redhat is not different from Microsoft. Forget about it. We keep looking for a savior or something like. Novell did a lot of s.. stuff with Netware. They lost to Microsoft. Samething for Sun, etc. Dont think these companies think about anything else than money. So put Linux away from that. You dont like Redhat line, use something different. If you work in a company with resources they will go for what they need. So let us not mix Home users and Enterprise users. If these linux companies see money in the desktop they will go for it too. The not evil crap, dont buy it.
It is all about the benjamins baby.
“Imagine a world where RedHat would sell their products for a reasonable price and give users full download support for seven years. How many home desktop copies would RedHat have sold if they charged only $40.00? ”
you know how much Redhat EL costs for the academic edition? No?
how about redhat desktop?
No?
look at both then
lovely bubble-era reasoning, there. You can’t make up losses through volume. If you’re making a unit loss, the only thing volume gets you is a *bigger* loss.
<<Linux was taking the server world by storm>>
And still is.[0]
<QUOTE>
In the first quarter of 2004, sales of GNU/Linux servers increased 56.9% over the same period in 2003. That performance follows six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth for the free operating system, according to a report by IDC.
</QUOTE>
<<they would have hurt Sun and Microsoft bad>>
Sun is getting killed by the commodity market. The same market that Linux, RH in paticular, is flourishing. How long has it been since Sun posted a profit? Why does Sun have the need to bash RH on a weekly basis? Why are they trying to opensource Solaris? Sun is in a scramble, trying feebly to reinvent themeselves but will fail. I guess their supposed “world-class innovation” can’t save them from their own stupidity.
Not hurting MS? Please explain the multi-million dollar “Get the Facts” campaign?
<<now Microsoft is cheaper than “Linux” and Solaris is cheaper than “Linux” too.
Ah so now were talking about “Linux”, not RH? You seem to be unable to make up your mind up.
Well. I’m a SUSE fanboy and can tell you confidently that SLES 9 is most definatly cheaper and outperforms Win2003.[1]
<QUOTE>
Not only does SLES9 perform better on the same hardware, but it costs less – possibly more than 1/10th the cost of a Microsoft solution.
</QUOTE>
Also I’m assuming your referring to Solaris 10. Sun has:
1.) Not released Solaris 10 yet.
2.) Not released the pricing scheme from Solaris 10.
Where are you getting your info?
<<And for a lot of business, there just isn’t any incentive to use Linux.>>
Better tell Oracle before they finish their 14,000 user conversion to Linux.[2] Citing:
<QUOTE>
Oracle is switching because Linux systems are less expensive and faster
</QUOTE>
[0] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7678
[1] http://www.flexbeta.net/main/printarticle.php?id=81
[2] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39155956,00.h…
I should proofread before I submit.
“Ah so now were talking about “Linux”, not RH? You seem to be unable to make up your mind up.”
Ignore 2nd “up”
“2.) Not released the pricing scheme from Solaris 10.”
*for
“What?? Am I leaving in another world. Okay. Redhat went for the money. So what. I see the company stocks growing more than ever. Isnt that why now Sun is attacking Redhat.”
Don’t you get it? I’m not making RedHat to be a saviour. I am merely saying rather than going for becoming the next Microsoft, they chose to be the next Novell, just another competitor that got killed by Microsoft. If they chose to make profit via volume, their distribution would have been it. RedHat would have equalled Linux. There would not be any incentive to use a less known distribution.
“lovely bubble-era reasoning, there. You can’t make up losses through volume. If you’re making a unit loss, the only thing volume gets you is a *bigger* loss.”
Lovely small-thinking on your part. Software is a whole different ball game from hardware. There is a very negligible cost to manufacturing the product, the real cost is only in development. You just have to look at your market potential. RedHat could have taken the world. They could have gunned for some Chinese Linux distro, some Indian Linux distro, some Arabic one, cut costs on development in those countries, and focus on translation only, and sold it to the world at an affordable price. Their market potential was amazing. Oh well, now Microsoft and Sun are back in the game.
I am merely saying rather than going for becoming the next Microsoft, they chose to be the next Novell, just another competitor that got killed by Microsoft. If they chose to make profit via volume, their distribution would have been it. RedHat would have equalled Linux. There would not be any incentive to use a less known distribution.
Obviously you failed to understand OOS economic model. Because of their contribution to the Linux community, it is no surprising that people often consider Red Hat as Linux. Unlike Novell of the past, Red Hat release their sources to the public due to GPL license. Microsoft has a hard time with that issue because they cannot buy any Linux source codes hence their ‘get the fact’ ads.
They could have gunned for some Chinese Linux distro, some Indian Linux distro, some Arabic one, cut costs on development in those countries, and focus on translation only, and sold it to the world at an affordable price.
Huh? Some of Linux distros are based from Red Hat (insert type) source codes. Red Hat is only focusing on entreprise while other distros are free to compete on other category. Only difference here is the support. Better get back to read Red Hat model again.
You are the one that does not understand. Your posts are clearly showing your ignorance of OSS economics.
You comment that “the real cost is only in development”, but RH is completely opensource. Any advantage a particular technology that RH developed would be shared with the community and their competition aswell. RH creates value by offering support and certfication.
<<focus on translation only, and sold it to the world at an affordable price.>>
First, an example to illustrate my point. RH has recently released 5 new Indian Language fonts.[0] What is stopping another distro to implement these fonts? Money was spent but in the end, it adds no competitive edge.
I could break down the rest of your post but I’ll spare you the embarrassment. Face facts, you don’t have a clue.
[0] http://itnation.com/cgi-bin/itn/site/linux/article.cgi?print=1&arti…
“RedHat could have taken the world. They could have gunned for some Chinese Linux distro, some Indian Linux distro, some Arabic one, cut costs on development in those countries,”
this wouldnt work for many reasons
1) the distributions in asia are cash starved and mostly about translation and localisations rather than investing and innovating new products into the linux world. you would hard pressed to find anything in those distributions that redhat could effectively use other than those translation efforts. precisely the opposite of what you seem to expect
“RH has recently released 5 new Indian Language fonts.[0] What is stopping another distro to implement these fonts? Money was spent but in the end, it adds no competitive edge. ”
this is another important point to think about. these five languages were extensively translated by volunteers who went ahead and created their own distros like indlinux( based on redhat and fedora) and banglalinux(based on morphix). they couldnt directly do it with redhat because they didnt have unicode free/open source fonts. redhat *paid* fontographers to create those indian language fonts inorder to integrate these translations into their distribution
if they had been waiting for these distributions to buy or create these fonts it might never have happened because these were done by students or volunteers who didnt have the money to invest in these technology
You are the one without the clue. RedHat is playing a losing game right now. “Support” and “certification” do not warrant such outrageous prices. RedHat is losing marketshare. The fact that so many alternatives have come up proves this. The fact that Dell says RedHat is over priced proves this. The fact that Sun, Microsoft, and Novell are in the game proves this. The only way for open source to make money is to play the volume game. Sell to as many users as possible, so the product will be so cheap that there is no incentive to use another less popular product. They can support their product for a period of 7 years with download only support and put some licensing restriction like they currently have. Companies will no longer be able to compete on features anymore because they are forced to share their features. Companies will not be able to compete on consulting either, the products are simple and easy enough to use that you don’t need to pay so much money for someone to help you. The brand name game is the only business the open source model leaves open. The reason why people buy your product is because of the proven support, name, product quality, the knowledge that you are big enough so you won’t disappear in a few years, and most importantly, the fact that your product is affordable.
“Support” and “certification” do not warrant such outrageous prices. RedHat is losing marketshare. The fact that so many alternatives have come up proves this.
Outrageous price for who? Larger entreprise like Oracle or you?
The fact that Dell says RedHat is over priced proves this.
That is Dell statement, not fact, that does not mean that all other Dell competitors will agree. Read this topic again: http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9099
The fact that Sun, Microsoft, and Novell are in the game proves this. The only way for open source to make money is to play the volume game.
Clearly you don’t have any clue about OSS entreprise model.
Remember, Red Hat is open source company unlike both Microsoft, Sun and Novell thus negative your statement.
They can support their product for a period of 7 years with download only support and put some licensing restriction like they currently have. Companies will no longer be able to compete on features anymore because they are forced to share their features.
Once again, you failed to understand how OSS market works, please do some research before making absurdities.
“You are the one without the clue. RedHat is playing a losing game right now. “Support” and “certification” do not warrant such outrageous prices”
for enterprise users the cost of the OS is trivial compared to the ISV products like oracle or bea
It should be noted that the whole software is available for free and their are binary rebuilds of rhel available elsewhere like centos.org which satisfies the needs of end users who only need software.
so the equation boils down to this: only software get centos
want support and certification get rhel
that customers over 98,000 choose rhel seems to be validating the price model of redhat. academic editions and workstations cost $50. bulk prices can be negotiated
“Once again, you failed to understand how OSS market works, please do some research before making absurdities. ”
Ummm, actually, I think you are the one with the failure for understanding the open source market. If you would actually think for a minute, you would see that noone has quite “understood” how it works. Everyone is attacking it in different ways and are failing spectacularily.
Answer this question: if you were running a business, would you buy a desktop system for $50 for 7 years patch download support from RedHat? Compare that to JDS ($50 or $ 100 / year) and Microsoft ($250 for 7 years). RedHat doesn’t have to do anything spectacular, business would buy from them because their product is priced cheap, they trust RedHat, and RedHat has put down their roadmap for them.
Also, just because they support a release for seven years, it won’t mean it will be the only release. On the contrary, they would release a newer version every 1 – 1.5 years and leave it up to their customers to decide if the new features warrant an upgrade.
But hey, obviously you know how open source is gonna make money. “Support and Certifications” hahahha… that’s a good one.
<<RedHat is playing a losing game right now. “Support” and “certification” do not warrant such outrageous prices.>>
Software is becoming commodity, the money will continue to shift towards support.
Why do you think IBM/HP has spent billions of dollars on Linux, when they could just improve their own products (AIX/HPUX)? They realized early on that its more effective to compete on “solutions” rather than invest in their own products. The reason Linux isnt more prevalient in these companies is that Linux still has technical limitations. As time goes on, they will continue to phase out their own products.
<<RedHat is losing marketshare.>>
Marketshare vs Installbase. A diverse ecosystem does not mean RH is doing poorly. Also this has to do with the emergence of systems w/o support, like CentOS and other community driven projects(Debian/Gentoo).
<<The fact that so many alternatives have come up proves this.>>
What new alternatives[READ:that prove support]? The only viable one I see is SUSE and they have existed since 1992!
<<The fact that Sun, Microsoft, and Novell are in the game proves this.>>
Wow, so your saying that Sun/MS/Novell exsit because of Red Hat’s supposedly poor business scheme? LMAO!
<<The only way for open source to make money is to play the volume game.>>
Again, this is not proprietary software. You just don’t understand. *sigh*
<<Sell to as many users as possible, so the product will be so cheap that there is no incentive to use another less popular product.>>
IT IS NOT THE PRODUCT THEY ARE SELLING!!! They sell SUPPORT Why don’t you understand this? Do you have a learning impediment?!?!
<<They can support their product for a period of 7 years with download only support and put some licensing restriction like they currently have.>>
What licensing restrictions?
<<Companies will no longer be able to compete on features anymore because they are forced to share their features.>>
Yup, thats for agreeing with me.
<<The brand name game is the only business the open source model leaves open.>>
And how do you create brand recognition in OSS? Superior support!
Buddy. do you mind using PARAGRAPHS?
“…[READ:that prove support]?”
*provide
“Yup, thats for agreeing with me.
”
*thanks
Damn, I type too fast and read too slow.
<<“Support and Certifications” hahahha… that’s a good one.>>
I’ll put this simply….so even you can understand.
EX//
I am in charge of an Enterprise IT infrastructure.
I would like to implement “Linux”.
I have commerical products from Oracle and other various entities that only provide support for RH and SUSE.
I need support.
I require trained engineers to maintain our equipment but only RH and SUSE have certification programs.
What are my choices?
Can you wrap your tiny mind around that?
“Answer this question: if you were running a business, would you buy a desktop system for $50 for 7 years patch download support from RedHat? Compare that to JDS ($50 or $ 100 / year) and Microsoft ($250 for 7 years). RedHat doesn’t have to do anything spectacular, business would buy from them because their product is priced cheap, they trust RedHat, and RedHat has put down their roadmap for them. ”
ok. they arent doing anything spectacular as such but there is significant difference between what redhat,sun and MS are doing
MS doesnt add the support cost to the operating system. MS sells the operating system and components seperately from their support infrastructure.
Sun JDS model is more comparable to Redhat Desktop WS as they are both focussed on typical workstation markets with bulk licensing. pricing is also pretty competitive
What Redhat does with EL is pretty well explained here
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7288
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7692
It is quite clear that you are whining around because RHEL does not fit you.
How many workstations copies would they have sold if they charged only $70 / workstation? How many servers would they have sold if they had charged only $400 for standard and $1200 for enterprise?
This can be easily seen by comparing the Mandrake Linux’s financial report and last Red Hat’s Form 10-Q:
Mandrake Linux: 3.9 million euro last year, 4.9 million euro estimated by KBC Securities in the next year.
Red Hat: 30,9 million dollar from March to May 2004.
Red Hat Linux never ever had the retail installation base of SuSE or Mandrake Linux. And you should face the fact that the revenue by RHEL subscription is simply 30x that of the bussiness model you suggested.
In fact for both Mandrake Linux and SuSE, the revenue from retail sales never was able to support the R&D. Mandrake Linux was near bankrupt, the more enterprise-directed SuSE was slightly below the borderline of profitability for years before the Novell acquisition, kept alive by financial infusion from IBM and others.
Forgot to mention the figures were for retail sales in the case of MandrakeSoft, subscription for Red Hat.