it does look like redhat has won [LWN.net]

it does look like redhat has won

Posted Oct 24, 2005 22:56 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)
Parent article: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

maybe it was their head start in the linux market....maybe they just have a better sales force...but every time i hear of new large contracts being awarded, i tend to hear redhat's name more than i hear novell's.

redhat has many advantages:

- redhat is not tied to an old cash cow that distracts the sales force from pushing new products. novell's existing codebases appear to form the bulk of their revenue, which means the salesforce is still pushing it.

- redhat does not have a confusing product line - its pretty much rhel and the support contracts for it. novell has novell desktop linux and suse pro. i cannot figure out how they market these products and i suspect many other people can't either. suse has no presence in the north american market. if they insist on keeping the name, it should be for europe only.

- redhat is not hitching its wagon to dead projects from unwise acquisitions. i am talking about mono and ximian. from what i can tell all ximian has brought to the table is pedigree and a lot of great blog posts. the world does not care about dotnet compatibility...maybe this was in the air at one point but that train has left the station. the new "platform" is the web, not a vm runtime and api.

- redhat seems to have gotten the jump on opensuse with fedora, from what i can tell commands a much larger market in early adopters.

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it does look like redhat has won

Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:11 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

While I'm not big fan of mono I can say it's good stuff and Novell does not spend too much resources on it: RedHat is pushing GCJ and this is effort of roughly the same order. And I'm not sure we'll forever use web-architecture: it's ugly, slow and inefficient, *VM is much better. Unfortunatelly both Sun and Microsoft are trying to control *VM-approach (Java in Sun's case, .NET in Microsoft's case) totally so of course open architecture wins.

RedHat is just smaller and faster, Novell plays catch up so far, that's all. We'll see what happens.

it does look like redhat has won

Posted Oct 25, 2005 4:03 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

>> RedHat is pushing GCJ and this is effort of roughly the same order.

redhat can afford it, they aren't the ones with shareholders demanding action.

>> and I'm not sure we'll forever use web-architecture: it's ugly,

its as ugly as your widget set and native browser, which is the same level of beauty and/or ugliness you will get from tools binding the widgetsets locally.

>> slow and inefficient, *VM is much better

the speed of the network is constant across any app.

and whether you think running apps on vms as opposed to apps via markup is better, it doesn't matter, the web audience is 500 million users.

It ain't over till the fat lady sings

Posted Oct 25, 2005 8:17 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

>> and I'm not sure we'll forever use web-architecture: it's ugly,
its as ugly as your widget set and native browser, which is the same level of beauty and/or ugliness you will get from tools binding the widgetsets locally.

I'm talking about web-applications of architecture. (X)HTML+JavaScript is slow, error-prone way of doing things. You can not even handle keyboard events in sane way! Sure - it can all be fixed with new clients, but... if we need new clients anyway then why not just switch to sane model ?

>> slow and inefficient, *VM is much better
the speed of the network is constant across any app.

Speed of network - yes. If you transfer the same amount of data across the network, that is. *VM makes it possible to process a lot of data locally. Think about Flash: it's primitive VM and that exactly why so much sites are using it. Unfortunatelly today both Java and C# lack simple tools for simple applications - and when you are creating simple prototype as web-based application you are stuck later. Microsoft is trying to change it with XAML. Free world have XUL but since it's coupled with insane language it does not help much. Plus there are no 500 millions of clients with XUL support, but there will be 500 millions of clients with XAML - you can bet on it.

and whether you think running apps on vms as opposed to apps via markup is better, it doesn't matter, the web audience is 500 million users.

Hmm... And what this argument does here on LWN ? Either Linux does not matter or something's wrong with your arguments: there are over 500 million Windows users but relatively small number of Linux users so Linux and thus LWN do not matter.

Sorry, but this reminds me of old TCP/IP vs IPX dispute. 20 years ago it was quite clear that TCP/IP is bloated and unsuitable for "real-world networks" and everyone worked with IPX: games, messanging, etc. Where is IPX now ? I think HTML-obsession will fade over time and we'll switch to more sane model: HTML+JavaScript do not scale. Which model will surpass today's HTML+Javascript is still open question.

It ain't over till the fat lady sings

Posted Oct 25, 2005 15:44 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

>> I'm talking about web-applications of architecture.
>> (X)HTML+JavaScript is slow, error-prone way of doing things.

such as?

>> *VM makes it possible to process a lot of data locally. Think about
>> Flash: it's primitive VM and that exactly why so much
>> sites are using it.

??? people use flash because it is a shortcut to dynamic content, and frankly its designer tools are better. the adoption of flash has nothing to do with its treatment of network traffic - it operates the same way the browser does with respect to data. it has a local cache, a scripting layer, and a network socket available.

>> Hmm... And what this argument does here on LWN ? Either Linux does not
>> matter or something's wrong with your arguments

the web platform has already taken off and no it doesn't matter what OS you use as long as it is fairly stable, supports a decent browser, and has network support. this works out in *favor* of linux, since linux now favorably competes on basis of price, given equal feature support. in your VM/api world, linux cannot compete because microsoft and sun will never release 100% free (osi-compliant, "free as in speech") versions of their VMs and apis. so i think your point is self-defeating, unless you are willing to accept non-free software. in the webapp world, you don't have to.

>> Sorry, but this reminds me of old TCP/IP vs IPX dispute.

how and why are webapps tied to a single network implementation? the 500 million people using the web aren't going anywhere. they will be using the web in a decade and two decades in some form (an open network with markup based communications).

it does look like redhat has won

Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:35 UTC (Mon) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Novell's revenue last quarter was $290 mil and it was still profitable so it's not _that_ bad.

I'm excited about OpenSuse. That will help build the SuSE brand and it's a better way to develop software anyway. Based on how Fedora did, it will take a couple years before OpenSuse really gets rolling.