Latest statistics for the Web server market show that Fedora, Red Hat’s free Linux operating system, is growing in popularity. But the picture isn’t quite so rosy for its enterprise offering.
Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines
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if no vendor support is needed?
Most sites simply do not need to be 99.99% available.
Carsten
if software does its job then you shouldn’t need support.
People pay for support because:
1) Patches for bugs.
2) Patches for security issues.
Having vendor support is critical in business. Try telling your stock holders that your have your mission critical app’s running on unsupported OS or unsupported hardware. I guarantee you will be looking for a new job fast. How about telling them that your OS is in perpetual beta mode.
I would be interesting to see the names of these sites released.
Somewhere along the line people will learn that people will get bitten. Wait for the next patch folks.
Am I bashing RH, not at all. RH Enterprise system is a darn fine product. But don’t forget, if you don’t buy RH, then there might not be a Fedora tomorrow. Fefodor is a test bed for RH Enterprise and that’s it.
The Web server market has always been dominated by rather simple mass deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (the lowest variant with a Web server being supported) is probably not the right product for such a market (especially considering the word “mass”).
> But don’t forget, if you don’t buy RH, then there
> might not be a Fedora tomorrow. Fefodor is a test
> bed for RH Enterprise and that’s it.
In my experience managers use to think short term.
Carsten
Looks like this journalist is confusing Red Hat Linux 7/8/9 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Red Hat systems that have decreased were most likely running RHL prior to RHEL being released, such as sites running Red Hat 9 who have decided after 15 months of no security/bug fixes, it is time to upgrade. The important figures, especially for Red Hat, are the number of subscriptions.
What would be interesting is the number of Centos installations.
Why would people go with Fedora which changes so often and has a short suppor term when you can go with Debian which has a much longer support term?
I mean if you are doing simple web hosting, Debian is just perfect for that.
Anaconda, the Fedora installer, might be a reason.
Carsten
Well, pica, the Debian installer is text based but it is very simple and straight forward. I am talking here about the new intaller not the old one.
I mean if you have the bucks, support Red Hat by all means. I just would not pay for an enterprise license for something like a LAMP server.
Look, one of the first things IBM added to Informix is the installer. And a´s far as I heard, it is a graphical one.
Carsten
”
I mean if you have the bucks, support Red Hat by all means. I just would not pay for an enterprise license for something like a LAMP server.
”
I would agree with that. A LAMP server doesnt need RHEL. even Red Hat doesnt target that segment with RHEL
If you decide to install linux on your webserver, I guess it’s because you have some knowledge about the damn thing. And beside, with all the forums and IRC channels around every distro out there, who needs commercial support except the gov?
if software does its job then you shouldn’t need support.
Doesn’t that kill off the way to make money in open source? I’ve always wondered about that how a company makes money if there product doesn’t need support. What incentive is ther to provide decent documentation when it will cut into your revenue?
It is interesting how the article declares the 122% increase for Fedora, but doesn’t give you the percentage drop in RHEL. Here we go:
20,000 Fewer Deployments / 1.61 million Deployments = 1%
Is this significant enough to say that RHEL is declining? It doesn’t seem so to me.
Brandon Petersen
I find this talk of support laughable. How many unix admins are forced to use sub-par distros because the decision was left up to a manager ( yes I do as well ). We are transitioning many of out systems to Fedora because we are moving away from stateful computers and moving towards computational nodes. We realize that state=management=waste of time for most apps. We manage a databse that tells the installer what to do. We track the base OS closely, but not exactly based on our needs.
Since it’s almost as easy to re-install a node as it is to diagnose and fix, what’s the point of concerning myself with a distro like RHEL.
So for us, and I assume many others, fedora is a good choice. For web hosts it makes perfect sense, farmiliary to anyone who had read a RedHat book, many software packages, and no per-node licensing.
Fedora really does have no place in the work environment. It is constantly changing, it has many problems, and it’s life is too short between upgrades. We’ve discovered that it is a poor choice almost anywhere in the enterprise. On the other hand, RHEL is much too expensive (especially since there are so many free alternatives). What we’ve settled on is to deploy CentOS for web servers, mail servers, name servers, etc. and save RHEL for the database and other extremely important services.
20,000 Fewer Deployments / 1.61 million Deployments = 1%
Nice catch!
I have been suspicious of netcrafts reports for a while now for quite a few reasons.
Also as someone else noted they appear to be talking about regular RHL (7-9) Of course there will be less ‘enterprise servers’, its not a free ISO anymore like it was when 80% of the linux community was running RHL.
Fedora is actually quite stable; for a webserver its actually not a bad choice especially when taking into account they have a SElinux targeted policy for apache. Of course, RHEL is more solid and if my job was on rocky ground id go with RHEL. But for my little websites fedora works great. If I had to make changes across 200+ machines I’d certainly be using RHN then, which you can’t use if you’re running Fedora.
The number of Web sites running Red Hat Enterprise Linux decreased by almost 20,000 over the last six months, although it remained the most common Web server operating system with over 1.61 million deployments (out of the four million Web sites surveyed).
…….
Phipps admitted that commercial distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SuSE are likely to be overrepresented in the Netcraft survey as the survey is based on information contained in their Apache headers, which are less likely to be changed in out-of-the-box installations.
Need to put on your FUD busting goggles for this article. 20K out of 1.61M? that is nothing. I am not trying to argue the counter point just trying to point out a pile of crap when i see one.
RHEL Declining? Gee I wonder why? Perhaps its the insane licensing and maintenance support costs. They make Microsoft’s pricing look like the Salvation Army.
Does not seem grounded in facts. I could maintain 200 Fedora (servers/computation nodes/desktops) almost as easly as a dozen. Using the built in tools allows me to maintain them from a centralized server being able to control, restrict, and add packages as I see fit although for the most part I take what upstream provides. With only minor customization I can also deploy a new box in a matter of minutes from an existing profile.
That is interesting.
Could you give some keywords or the names of the tool you use for remote managementL Or point where a tutorial or manual is published on the web?
I just don’t understand all of this fascination with graphical installers! An installer is a program that was made to install something else. By definition, it is only run during the install. Who cares if it has a pretty UI, you’re only going to need it when you install the OS!
Sure, Debian’s new installer isn’t a whiz-bang graphical masterpiece, but it gets the job done very well (I’ve been a Debian user for a couple of years now, and find the new installer even more pleasant to use than the older one).
For grandma or grandpa (or other Linux neophytes), a graphical installer is necessary, but to an experienced Linux user, it shouldn’t make a difference.
A lot of Sys. Admins use Debian for their servers, and find the text-based installer all they need.
Ubuntu and Gentoo are lighting up the distro wars again. RHEL is the de facto corporate distro, and likely will be for some time, but I do see Ubuntu clobbering Fedora in the desktop/free market. Seriously, try it, it destroys Fedora in so many ways:
1 install CD,
based on Debian (so shit actually works),
a nice community,
focus on ease of use.
Countering this argument:
1 install CD
Not again. Ubuntu is clearly desktop oriented while Fedora Core is mostly a general purpose systems that comes with new technologies(lvm2, SELinux with policies as one of them), development packages, KDE and more hence 4CDs. AFAIK, Ubuntu does not come with THEM.
based on Debian (so shit actually works),
That is your bias. This is your preference that does not reflect ALL users.
a nice community,
So has Fedora Core: http://www.fedoraforum.org
focus on ease of use.
That should be compared to distros like Xandros and Linspire.
Not again.
Fedora really does have no place in the work environment. It is constantly changing, it has many problems, and it’s life is too short between upgrades.
You didn’t bother to read Fedora Core webste, did you? If you were honest, you would list the problem you had with Fedora so some reader can give you osome solution. Also, you didn’t have to upgrade.
We’ve discovered that it is a poor choice almost anywhere in the enterprise.
AFAIR, Red Hat did not recommend to use Fedora in enterprise environment though some people do at their own risk. You should specify what size is your enterprise so readers can see that.
I use both fcr1,2 and 3 currently on different boxes,
fedora core release 1 has been running as smooth as silk hosting 5 websites for me
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.linux-noob.com&probe=1
and i use the fcr2 box simply because i set it up as a thin client pxe boot server, for demo-ing thin client to customers,
the fcr3 machines are laptops and they just run and run,
web serving is no issue, however, i do compile apache/mysql and php myself as i prefer apache 1.3.x compared to the bundled 2.x version.
Fedora is a test bed for what Red Hat will release components of in its next generation RHEL release, they are doing this for a very good reason, easy way to get bug feedback (so many users) and its a great way of innovating.
I take my hat off to Red Hat for giving the linux community Fedora, and I’m sure that any linux admin running webservers for business, will be going with a supported solution from Red Hat (or other vendor) rather than living with the possible outcome of losing a days business because mysql hosed the system.
I’m not saying Fedora is lacking (not at all), I’m just saying that it is an evolving operating system, and that anyone who uses it, should understand that. I am not admin’ing web servers for business so I see no problem at all running Fedora to host my websites.
Go Fedora and thank you Red Hat for giving us this operating system.
cheers
anyweb
I don’t understand why people would deploy Fedora in the enterprise just because it is free. If you go with something like CentOS, you get 5 years or more of support (ie No Upgrading at all) and right now, the packages included in CentOS 4 are very similar to what is found in Fedora Core 3.
I’ve always wondered that….would someone please explain this to me?
My guess is not everyone has heard of it, I didn’t know if it until a couple months ago and now use it on a server at home, and a desktop at work. Everything else is fc3 or rawhide.
Hi, Ubuntu is not “clearly desktop oriented”, it just happens to have a really kickarse desktop. 🙂
It is a general purpose Linux system, with global commercial and community support. Notably, the 18 month security / high-impact bugfix support cycles are much longer than Fedora’s 8 or 9 (can’t say for sure, because there’s no firm commitment to release dates or support cycles, one depends on the other). Yep, that’s shorter than RHEL, but given a couple more releases, we’ll see what happens on that front. 🙂
Can someone explain these numbers, please?
From the Netcraft Web Surveys:
– Red Hat and Fedora make together less than 2 million Active Sites
– Seven most visible Linux distributions make together less than 4 million Acive Sites
– Web Server survey for March 2005 lists close to 25 million Active Sites in total, about 19 million of them run Apache.
So, Linux runs less than 15% of all Active Sites? Linux runs less than 20% of all Active Sites running Apache???
What the heck is running “other” 85% of Active Sites? “Other” 80% Apache Web servers?? Is it Windows ME???
These numbers don’t compute. We all know success of the Linux on the server market.
So, Linux runs less than 15% of all Active Sites? Linux runs less than 20% of all Active Sites running Apache???
What the heck is running “other” 85% of Active Sites? “Other” 80% Apache Web servers?? Is it Windows ME???
“I have heard only of linux, and nothing else, lalalala”
Apache runs on many platforms, Linux is only one of them.
I thought red hat ended all and fedora was made from those in red hat who wanted to continue?
Guess not.
Just purchased this for a corp email gateway and I must say I am not that impressed with it for the 1200 bucks it cost.
I really think that Gentoo is better suited for a corp enterprise project than RH EH 4.0, with Gentoo I can easily setup a clean custom setup with minimal bloat in about 1 hour and thats with a custom compiled kernel optimized for my hardware. For something like a email gateway server there is 0 need for a x server or desktop, hence it only takes about 1 hour to install a base Gentoo System.
With Gentoo it’s a piece of cake to install things Like PG 8.0 while on RH EL your stuck with 7.x unless you want to install the unsupported 8.0
After the base install of RH EL there was tons of bloat, including the useless console mouse services, and several editors that I most certainly don’t need for a server.
Just my 2 cents
Notably, the 18 month security / high-impact bugfix support cycles are much longer than Fedora’s 8 or 9 (can’t say for sure, because there’s no firm commitment to release dates or support cycles, one depends on the other).
With Fedora Legacy, the cycle is definitive longer than 8-9 months. In fact, Fedora Core 1 is still supported.
Just purchased this for a corp email gateway and I must say I am not that impressed with it for the 1200 bucks it cost.
You did buy an AS for an e-mail gateway?
I really think that Gentoo is better suited for a corp enterprise project than RH EH 4.0 […]
Do you really think e-mail gateways are the only purpose for a computer in a corporate environment? Maybe you should try to run Oracle 10g on a 8-way SMP by first installing Gentoo on it.
Yep, we sure did, because with the lesser version red hat will only support two CPUs, so if we call them with issues and we are running a quad they won’t help us(not that we will ever call them anyway).
Also Oracle runs fine on Gentoo, as does Domino, I know for a fact Domino actually runs better on Gentoo than it does on Red Hat. I can turn on all the same crap in the gentoo compiled kernel that the RedHat EL offers.
My point was you don’t really need the “Enterprise” version of Redhat to accomplish the same goal, and there is no guarentee that RedHat won’t fold up in 3 years. I can get the same level of support i.e. bug fixes etc from Gentoo for free.
I actually called Redhat once for support and they couldn’t help us because the TCP/IP issue was to advanced….
After that I switch to Gentoo for my Department and we have never had one issue and I get all the support I could ever want from gentoo.org. Gentoo’s docs are better than Redhat’s and I don’t have to spend 1200 per server to get it 🙂
Also Oracle runs fine on Gentoo, as does Domino, I know for a fact Domino actually runs better on Gentoo than it does on Red Hat. I can turn on all the same crap in the gentoo compiled kernel that the RedHat EL offers.
IBM domino? -Cringe- What did you do to deserve that punishment?
All of the comments here are from users that are competent in any Linux system. My slant is from a person interested in a desktop and one capable of giving some form of help for installing something extra or needed.
It seems to me after installing several different Versions of Linux that all are very lacking in these issues. The problems of getting hardware to work in an internet environment are not dealt with. I think anyone could choose any version they wanted and have the exact copy of each.
I like Fedora for simple install, this is where I stop liking it because this is where Fedora stops for people like myself. Information is outdated and buried deep where new users to linux would never think to look. Physical changes like stack size and other things have been tampered with so that 3rd party drivers are useless. We the ignorant don’t have much chance in deciding on a desktop system. Seems to me Linux has a long way to go in the mainstream.
I’ll keep trying the new releases and watch for some change in the thought process of putting out an operating system that is truely for everyone. To me the one most important accomplishment for any version of linux would be to get it on line. If that means another complete CD full of programs or drivers then that’s the way it should be.
So if you like pretty then go Fedora Core 3. If you like to be able to keep up with the outside world, forget it.
T Materene