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Red Hat Software

Journal Otter's Journal: Red Hat hemorrhages customers; Dopey comment of the day 8

Journal by Otter
An interesting point buried in this story, if you get past the anti-M$ stuff: there's been a significant-looking shift among "software development managers" in their preference for "non-commercial" versus "commercial" Linux.

There's some spin about how this is tied to improvement by the hobbyist distros, but -- c'mon. There's only one reason for such a big shift in such a small timeframe. Red Hat's new business model must have sent a huge chunk of their base looking for alternatives. And if "software development managers" are saying that...

This comment, btw, was the "I literally L'd OL!" of the day. I think he's not joking...

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Red Hat hemorrhages customers; Dopey comment of the day More

Red Hat hemorrhages customers; Dopey comment of the day

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  • I think dropping offical support for the desktop is going to bite them in the butt. Fedora looks good so far, but the pointy-haired bosses only hear, "RedHat no longer supports the desktop" and they usually make the decisions, such as on what platforms software gets developed for and so on. So far nearly every commercial package we have looked at supports "Redhat" (usually some old crappy outdated version) and they seem to be ignoring Fedora, which is not good.
    • Well from where I sit the RedHat Desktop was always quite flaky, mostly because they insited on being the first distro to include the latest kernel, glibc, gcc, etc. Often releasing it to the wild with little or no quality control.

      While Fedora has improved (and has improved over RedHat releases) it still is far too buggy for my taste. Perhaps I'm weird in demanding Solaris, HPUX, or *BSD like reliablity and stablity, but I tend to like things to just work rather than having to run around trying to resolve
  • When Red Hat charges as much as(or in some cases with services, more than)proprietary software companies, why buy Red Hat? One of the advantages of Linux is supposed to be it's El Cheapo cost. So why pay at least $800 per server for Red Hat when I can get MS 2003 for the same price, or better yet, Solaris for Nada? And even if I get a service contract with Sun, I'm still in better shape than with Red Hat. Even more, if I have a large install base, just make sure my staff knows Linux and use Debian.

    Apparent

  • There's some spin about how this is tied to improvement by the hobbyist distros, but -- c'mon. There's only one reason for such a big shift in such a small timeframe. Red Hat's new business model must have sent a huge chunk of their base looking for alternatives. And if "software development managers" are saying that...

    Personally I'm skeptical, if you were getting RHL a couple of years ago and now use FC you've now magically moved from a commercial to a non-commercial choice ... even though it's basica

    • Personally I'm skeptical, if you were getting RHL a couple of years ago and now use FC you've now magically moved from a commercial to a non-commercial choice ... even though it's basically the same thing produced by the same people.

      While a lot of RedHat users simply moved to FC there are quite a few who, when RedHat dropped the base RH distro, took the opportunity to look at alternatives.

      If someone had some convincing stats. saying that people were moving from RHL, SuSE, etc. to Debian and Gentoo ... t

      • Well I would agree the popularity of Gentoo, especially in production environments, is scary. I find nothing scary about Debian. If anything it is less scary than Fedora Core.

        I'm not saying anyone shouldn't use debian, and I know a lot of very competant Linux people that have been doing so for years. My point was more that Debian isn't ready for everyone from RHL 8/9. Basically I'd be scared for two reasons: 1) Because Debian is very different from RHL, and 2) IMNSHO "Somewhat less forgiving of ignoran

    • Personally I'm skeptical, if you were getting RHL a couple of years ago and now use FC you've now magically moved from a commercial to a non-commercial choice ... even though it's basically the same thing produced by the same people.

      Assuming that's what's happening (and I'd guess it is but would have loved to see a more detailed followup question)...

      The importance of a Red Hat -> Fedora / CentOS / White Box switch depends on your point of view. To a Gentoo or Ubuntu fanboy, it's all the same. To a softw

      • The importance of a Red Hat -> Fedora / CentOS / White Box switch depends on your point of view ... But from Red Hat's point of view -- what these people *think* they're using has gone from Red Hat to Not Red Hat. I've got to think that matters to Red Hat.

        Well I've seen that argued (and argued it) quite a bit inside Red Hat, and now 18 months after FC1 went GA it doesn't seem that bad. Most people seem to associate FC with RH, and it's much better understood that the name means they get to keep both

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