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."
For us lazy readers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Who is this Wieers fellow?
What exactly did Shuttleworth propose?
What's the point of syncing Enterprise Linux releases?
What is and why is Wieers making this big stink?
Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Shuttleworth would benefit from synchronized releases. If there wasn't some advantage for his project, he wouldn't have suggested it. What he's suggesting is that everyone else would benefit too.
Sure, Red Hat puts a lot of effort into hardware support backports. But if Ubuntu, Debian, Novel and Red Hat all standardized on the same kernel releases for their six-month release cycles then hardware vendors would have one platform to target instead of four. That might very well increase vendor cooperation - even to a sufficient extent that Red Hat would get better hardware support than they have now with less investment.
Group benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn. I think vendors just talking to each other would solve half the problem. I don't know what the rest of the solution is.
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:1, Interesting)
And since the vast majority of their actual paid engineers are working on proprietary projects like Launchpad...
(Don't believe me? Ask a Canonical employee how many engineers are working on Launchpad.)
If OSS is evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Emergent cooperation FTW!
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Insightful is deserved. Or own the desktop at home, will drag Linux into the enterprise. Something RedHat and Novell have missed completely. If they continue to do so, many might just drag in Ubuntu... I would and will.
If anything, they should put out a home distro cheap and capitalize on Vista's shortcomings.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:5, Interesting)
Neither distro you mention, IMHO, is targeting home users in the way that Ubuntu is. You don't see friendly smiling people holding hands, one or two clicks to download, plain english on the front page and so on, to the degree that Ubuntu's homepage has it. You don't get offered free discs (I got 5 once, left them on the coffee-room table and after two months half the department was using Ubuntu).
Opensuse.org: Nice front page, three options - I clicked download - then I look at a complex table and it fails the WifeTest(TM) dismally.
Fedoraproject.org: When I did my WifeTest(TM), she went to fedora.com, then fedora.org (nice pictures of Mario but no distro). Then we found the site and again, she doesn't know what a freakin i386 is. "I have a laptop, does it say laptop?", she says.
Ubuntu.com: she guessed the right domain, clicked download after looking at the screen for a few minutes, then figured "I must have a standard computer" and started downloading. WifeTest(TM) said she would have bought or requested free CD's except she knew I could burn an ISO for her.
They are good, I agree with you - no worse than Ubuntu, probably. But marketing is everything when like is against like.
Mark Shuttleworth's response to competition. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:2, Interesting)
Give people more credit, especially those trying Linux for the first time.
Redhat Consumer Desktop (don't like consumer, but how about 'Redhat Fedora Desktop' ?)
Redhat Server
Redhat Enterprise Server (LTS)
What's wrong with that? people don't stop buying desktops because they can afford racks. They buy desktops because they cater towards a consumers needs such as graphics rather than power/wattage p/ inch. OS's are the same... You want to download the enterprise server and likely half the functions you want/need will be disabled by default (and vice versa). You want fancy effects, media players and consumer featured stuff you buy the desktop...
Consumers = Server is inferior
Enterprise = Desktop/workstation is inferior
No offence to fedora users (although admittedly I haven't used any rpm based distro in eons) but from my own perspective it would appear RH outsourced the 'consumer' market because they weren't getting any return and in doing so alienated by choice their own brand.
Look at this site:
http://fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org]
and then look right down at the very bottom of the page, just squint your eyes:
"
Copyright © 2008 Red Hat, Inc. and others. All Rights Reserved. Please send any comments or corrections to the websites team.
The Fedora Project is maintained and driven by the community and sponsored by Red Hat. This is a community maintained site. Red Hat is not responsible for content.
"
JIMHO, and this is jimho, RedHat appears to have actively DILUTED their own desktop OS on purpose rather than avoid brand confusion.
I'm sure this has been a discussion beaten into the ground, but you did ask for me to elaborate. I have no disrespect for Fedora or its abilities as an OS but I dont believe RH could distance themselves any further without risking an 'unofficial' out of their control distro of Linux
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:1, Interesting)
No company in there right mind would put linux on a desktop for less than $80 and propose that it replace home users software. I use the price $80, because RH already offers a desktop version for $80.
I think $80 is pretty cheap for a desktop with support. In fact it might be too cheap.
They currently have a distro called Fedora for home users that do not want to pay for support, but I think the average user, would want a stable version such as Enterprise Desktop.
One thing the other distributions haven't figured out is training. NOVL and LTS rely on LPI courses and I honestly haven't seen it go much farther than that for them.
RedHat has a suite of training classes that provide a lot of information on deploying a system for Enterprise/SMB usage. I think the key here is SMB usage, because this provides another level of business security which SMB need, otherwise they just can't use it.
Currently I can find someone who has a knowledge of computers and an descent skillset on linux (LPI). I can then figure out where they are in their knowledge of linux and where I need them to be and select classes for them to take at RedHat. I can't be assured of that with any other distro.
My point being that I don't think linux on the desktop is the great stepping stone we once thought it was going to be. I think it is probably going to be the other way around.
What business is really going to care that a future employee has gaming experience on an operating system? Besides ones looking for game testers.
Let Shuttleworth sync Ubuntu with RHEL (Score:5, Interesting)
So if you want free beer - go and get it yourself!
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:4, Interesting)
Try finding Vista drivers for a 10-year-old scanner that works perfectly under Linux (despite only ever having been shipped with a driver for '98 and a crappy one at that) and then tell me with a straight face that Windows has the best hardware support.
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who really benefits? (Score:2, Interesting)
The only involvement that I had in this (indeed, this was also the first time I knew she was going to try Ubuntu) was when she IMed me while I was at work and asked why the mouse on her laptop didn't work on Ubuntu. When I got home, I was expecting a botched install that was going to be hell to repair, but it turns out that it was 100% perfect and simply didn't work due to a faulty BIOS. I added the necessary boot argument (i8042.nomux=1) and it's worked perfectly ever since.
Just my $0.02.
Not big on Fedora... (Score:4, Interesting)
-Their 'releases' seem to mean little. They don't stick to the major revisions of software (Fedroa 8 box updated kernel to 2.6.24 and pidgin to 2.4 for example). As a result, third party drivers can exhibit different glitches or not work at all even during a routine update. Pidgin changed its UI and initially started crashing for me a lot when they went to 2.4. No matter what Fedora path you take, you are submitted to the bleeding edge across the board, not just the areas you are intrinsically interested in.
-They have no interest in helping users have a convenient time with binary software. I.e. annoying to install flash, nvidia, or ati binary drivers. It's one thing of the OSS alternatives are remotely comparable, but they simply are not at this point. ath5k when first adopted was no where near good enough for common usage. The nv driver is a waste of paying the nVidia premium. Ditto for the open source ATI driver until those efforts see fruition. And the open-source implementation of flash is getting closer, but is still far removed from a viable alternative.
All in all, Fedora feels to an extent like crippleware and a rolling beta. Knowing explicitly that as a user you are little more than a free tester for RedHat's for-profit endeavor is annoying. If I were interested in a specific major increase of a package such that I didn't want to wait a few months for the next distro rev, I'd download it myself.
Ubuntu's releases are not perfect (the hardy scheduler annoyance a good example), but the complaints are far less severe and I know when an update might require work. I'm too lazy to have to deal with a major change at a random time. It's the reason why I stopped using Gentoo after a couple of years.
Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.
Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you're doing it wrong. I manage a fairly large Enterprise environment, currently 600+ servers that is about 1/3 Linux, and we don't have chaos. We've run Linux in our Enterprise since about 1999, so we're not new to this. And we're currently consolidating another 500+ servers from other parts of the Enterprise, most of which are Linux. We haven't had these problems that you describe. Why? Because we work with our vendors. We don't just buy any hardware, or any config, and hope it will run Linux. Instead, we have a process to order hardware, and we do our homework first. When we purchase hardware that we know will run Linux, we specify to the vendor "Must be certified for RHEL5" or similar. So the vendor will only give us a quote for hardware that we know will work in our environment.
And do you know what happens when we do that up front? Things work.
This is easy because IBM and Dell and all the other (major) hardware vendors know that Enterprise IT shops like yours and mine run Linux. So they work hard to ensure Linux works with the hardware they sell. And at least with IBM and Dell (we use them a lot) they will certify their hardware for several key Linux distros. RHEL is a major distro with a lot of third-party software support (Oracle, WebLogic, PeopleSoft, ...) so it's often certified first.
Heck, at least in the case of IBM and Dell (and I'm sure with other vendors) you can get your Linux support directly from them. One support center if you have problems with the hardware or operating system. And with their third-party relationships, you can often call the same support center for problems with storage (EMC, ..), certain software, networks, etc. (Disclaimer: while this is available to us, we prefer to use Red Hat to support our OS, and the hardware vendor to support our hardware components. This is mainly because it makes purchasing licenses simpler. To get Linux support from IBM or Dell, you need to order your RHEL entitlements from IBM or Dell. As a University, it's actually easier for us to order entitlements separately from Red Hat than to do it as a single purchase through IBM or Dell - alas, that's how our purchasing department works.)
And no, we aren't lagging behind in the latest hardware. When the latest blades came out from IBM, they supported Linux. When the latest multi-core systems came out from Dell, they supported Linux. Everything works great from the moment we take it out of the box. We've never "scratch[ed] our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way" and we don't compile custom kernels. If that's how you support your Enterprise, you need to re-think what you're doing.
Re:Not big on Fedora... (Score:5, Interesting)
Rant away! That's part of what Slashdot is for!
The reason I call Fedora "geeky" is that it is, as you say, a rolling beta for RHEL. It's not stable, it's not supposed to be and it never will be. Although its marketing people don't like to admit it, Fedora is bleeding edge. That means it's going to take more work from the users to be productive than it would in a distro that's not changing as fast. I see it as a distro for geeks who like playing with their systems and want to have the newest versions of everything, whether they're really ready or not.
As far as getting mp3 support, and other things like that, I agree with you, but I understand their POV. They want to put out a distro that's free of patent, license or other legal encumbrances, and let the user add those difficult programs on their own. I'd rather they were less stiff about it, but they have strict principles and I'm not going to complain about their sticking to them.
Last, I say that Ubuntu isn't geeky because to me, at least, it's designed for people escaping from Windows. It's easy to install, it brings across your Windows Documents if you ask it, you don't need to remember a root password, and for the most part, It Just Works. Some things that are easy to do in other distros seem to be impossible, such as booting into a fully working system at init 3, but that's probably because the average Ubuntu user will never need to do that except in an emergency, so init 3 is set up for repair only. I know that a Windows user with no understanding of Linux can install and run Ubuntu because I've seen it done. I'd not ask that same person to try it with Fedora!