Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal 240
Nic Doye writes "Dag Wieers responds to Mark Shuttleworth's recent request to ask major Enterprise Linux distributions to synchronise releases, claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.' He's confessing to playing Devil's Advocate here, but it is an interesting view from someone with a large amount of experience in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS space."
Who really benefits? (Score:5, Insightful)
claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'
Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."
So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?
this again (Score:4, Insightful)
odd, it was my understanding that GPL'ed software was supposed to be used, not just by a few. I do understand his concern that Canonical and others should be contributing more useful software to the code base that is available but whining every time some distro uses the code that is available, adds to it and becomes popular is very very un-productive.
Re:this again (Score:2, Insightful)
Red Hat, Novell, Debian Foundation, and Canonical should not be constraining each other to that extent, or we'll just wind up with a big bureaucratic mess.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree - there is benefit for Red Hat (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, realistically we do. If projects knew that every May and every November there'd be major distro releases, they'd probably do a good job of freezing their trees in January and July to prepare point releases aimed at being relatively stable.
In turn, there'd be a nice set of releases that Red Hat could pick from and decrease their QA. Otherwise, it's kind of scattershot what the condition of various projects' trees are in.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm in agreement with him (Score:5, Insightful)
When an enterprise buys new hardware, they want the software to "just work" on it. It would be expensive for them to do the work themselves, so they are happy to pay someone else to do it. This is the value-added service that Red Hat gives. This is what an enterprise pays for.
It would be ludicrous to give your *competitor* this service for free *before* you give it to your customer. Sure, once you do the work, others can benefit -- that's part and parcel of free software. But you are allowed (I'm going to even say *expected*) to charge for your services.
Because Canonical and Red Hat are going after the same market, it is inevitable that there will be some overlap of effort. If Canonical wishes to use the work that Red Hat does, they merely have to wait until Red Hat releases.
But what worries me more here is that Canonical seems to miss the point where *creating a working distribution* is a money making opportunity. They seem to see it as a loss leader and they will charge for "support"; where "support" means hand-holding the user. Perhaps I'm wrong. I really hope I am.
Until companies understand that providing solutions and creating capability is the service where all the money is, we're not going to see the explosive growth in Free software that I'm hoping for. I had hoped that Canonical understood this. I still hope it's true, but I'm less optimistic.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For us lazy readers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I disagree - there is benefit for Red Hat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAIK probably the biggest reason Red Hat changed the name to Fedora was to eliminate brand confusion with RHEL.
It's not a good business decision to have two similarly labelled products out, especially with software when that usually indicates that one is crippleware. Long after the switch to Fedora there were still stores selling Red Hat 9 because they were confused by the whole Fedora/Red Hat/Red Hat Enterprise Linux thing.
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite sure of that. A fortune 500 company I know has ceased new orders for Microsoft and investing in a Linux desktop. It is at the tender stage where where if the CIO gets a massive pricing cut the program could be nixed an not unixed.
Microsoft is under sever pressure to get it's pricing down and quality up. They falter much more, knowing Linux will be the next fad want to have skill. And those that know Linux, getting Ubuntu, RedHat and SUSE working together is much easier than a NT to AD migration, plain and simple.
Just push Open Office and FireFox to the desktops first, nice and immediate MS-Office savings and a nice prep for the conversion. And if the MS salesperson says "Linux what?" You say the OS we are using to replace MS-Windows. Gets a pretty hefty discount if you can show you mean business. Your company wins either way.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org] http://www.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org]
Is there something I'm missing completely here, or are the comments above complete non-sequiturs?
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell your wife to enable Javascript.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's quite possible that in the not to distant future, Red Hat may find they're choking on the dust from Ubuntu. If that happens, that response will certainly sound like "famous last words."
The idea of "Why should we cooperate when we're kicking ass" just seems too egocentric and short sighted to ever sound like it was wise in the long run.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fedora is a fairly geeky distro. I use it and like it. However, when my non-tech sister wanted to try Linux, I got her Ubuntu. I still have to help her a little, but for the most part she can handle it herself, which I wouldn't expect with Fedora. Different distros designed for different people. Fedora's a geeky test bed, Ubuntu's for Windows refugees. Gentoo, of course, is for gamers. Pick the one that's right for you, which is more than you can do with Windows.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For us lazy readers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also kindof scary to see how many things I use on a day to day basis that are in the third party repos...
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a stable ABI and binary-only drivers, then fork one of the BSDs. Hell, you can even cage the Source Code up and release the whole kernel binary-only. Recompiling something occasionally is a price I'm quite willing to pay for software freedom.
Re:I disagree - there is benefit for Red Hat (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:this again (Score:4, Insightful)
RedHat does work on all levels of the GNU/Linux stack - kernel, compiler, c-library, gui libraries, apps. That means that if RedHat wants a feature (say SELinux) they can coordinate across projects rather than waiting for the right stuff to show up in repositories.
And don't kid yourselves, this is a huge competitive advantage that Ubuntu doesn't have.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
I just found this, haven't been on the RH site for a number of years
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/desktop/ [redhat.com]
Soo... quantaman, what is wrong with Fedora? Seems like an excuse to proprietise an OS without actually taking the code away from those that wrote it. If they just wanted to sell services, surely they'd just offer Fedora w/ paid support?
Again, I'm not trying to bait or flame here, been out the RH loop for a while and just curious really.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with abandoning the desktop, in my opinion, is that many new linux users are first exposed to Ubuntu. When they go to install a server they will then use either Ubuntu Server or Debian. RPM will be foreign to them.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is: Gentoo is a geeky test bed, Ubuntu is for gamers and other Windows refugees, and Fedora is the upgrade path for RedHat's non-Enterprise Linux.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:0, Insightful)
Keep in mind that some "enterprise" customers are still perfectly happy with Windows 2000. They don't want Fedora and Fedora doesn't want them. Therefore seperate branding makes perfect sense.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
This helps avoid exactly the OpenSSL/OpenSSH key craziness that just happened to Debian and Ubuntu, because someone got careless migrating the code and commented out an important piece. And avoiding that craziness is exactly what you pay companies like RedHat for.
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:4, Insightful)
The current situation of major distributions hand picking their own versions of packages + introducing distribution specific patches to them only adds to this problem. And then of course independent software developers further add to the problem by only testing on specific configurations of specific distributions. And we all know what a typical developer's workstation looks like. Few projects have the resources to organize broader integration testing.
What Shuttleworth suggests is that merely synchronizing on package versions & release schedule would broaden the scope of integration testing and reduce the amount of mostly non differentiating and needless variation. Effectively it would unify the integration testing work already done across distributions & projects and raise the level of quality across the whole community.
It's hard to see how this can be a bad thing.
A second point that Shuttleworth makes is that independent projects have their own roadmaps for stable releases. Distributions often have to deal with the fact that a nearly ready version of some component is vastly better than the year old stable version. That creates a dilemma: ship the old stable version or let users benefit from loads of useful fixes (that ultimately make the distribution more attractive). Firefox 3 beta 5 in Ubuntu was a good example. Probably a good decision but obviously the combination of OS and browser which at the time were both moving targets cannot have possibly been tested as well as would be desirable for a browser in a major desktop OS.
Wouldn't it be great if Mozilla had known a year in advance that if they'd pushed out Firefox 3 early April 2008, it would have made it into Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04, Slackware and Open Solaris release that each ship the exact same version of critical components that Firefox depends on.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not saying you're wrong but ubuntu enterprise is hardly losing money, I'm just kinda nostalgic and sad I guess that Ubuntu is basking in the former 'linux' glory of the RedHat of yesteryear.
I do believe in different codebases for each application - different strokes for different folks and all that but going so far as to completely distance yourself from the free community just seems well -- greedy and possibly even suicidal!
people not in the know or dont need stability will go for ubuntu (5 years ago I'd have said RH)
people in the know but dont need stability will go with ubuntu/fedora/suse/mandriva/slackware/ (insert fav distro here)
people in the know and with their own support will go with centos
and those that would prefer not to think about cost or are big enough to get cheaper services will go for RedHat/solaris/Suse/AIX...
A tiny bit of competitive pie for the biggest player.
I just don't understand why you think it makes perfect sense, it just smells like they are trying to do what Sun have done with OpenSolaris.
ahh well
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
Point im making is a nice webpage doesn't fix everything for desktop users. How about the ubuntu dev's start contributing the kinda code suse and redhat do to gnome and kde respectively? Does everyone go around saying Ubuntu abandonded the server market cause they dont have hardly any kernel contributions? Fedora is for a different segment of user. If ubuntu wants to be desktop linux then they have to deal with all the problems that come with that including fixing the "bugs" windows users have like "how come yahoo voice doesn't work" or how come thier favorite
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that is true, except she doesn't play games (except the default ones that come with gnome) but browses the internet, chats, plays music, does emails and writes her thesis. Yes, she hates the chat facility and so we go to the macbook and use iChat, which totally rules over the competition.
And I do agree, Linux generally has holes when it comes to things that matter for end users.
The WifeTest(TM) does show that Ubuntu is a royal pain for some things (but all the others are too, as it happens), mainly related to lack of support from commercial vendors such as Yahoo, as you say.
Remember though, that Windows got itself onto computers via SneakerNet, before the Internet. People used Windows at work because they used it at home. Everybody I knew who had a computer got their stuff from work. Amiga's weren't designed for businesses (sigh), and Apple II's didn't have decent wordprocessing and were already overpriced, so people got XT's .. then 286's with Windows 3.11, and so on. Everybody had a pirate copy of Word and Lotus 123 and whatever. And so it went on.
Where was Linux in all of that? Non-existent for most of it.
So the Windows monopoly was well on its way before the Internet (largely thanks to software piracy).
Linux is at least a decade, if not more, behind. But because it's free, because SneakerNets still exist, it is spreading.
Back to the point, though. You're right. Ubuntu is the new kid on the block and will face the same challenges as every other distro.
Just last week I was at a (non-computer-related) dinner and one of the guests started the conversation topic of "has anyone tried Linux yet?" - it's becoming more and more common. That's enouraging to me.
Re:For us lazy readers... (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, one cannot have his own opinion anymore ?