Over 750 Applications Now Certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux [LWN.net]

Over 750 Freedom Subtracted Applications?

Posted Apr 14, 2004 8:23 UTC (Wed) by janneke (subscriber, #15012) [Link]

I immediately went to see and check whether GNU LilyPond (v2.2.0) had already been registered/certified.

It had not, but wait, neither had Mozilla (firebird,firefox, etc.), or even bash and gcc.

It seems that you need to withhold the sourcecode of your software to become a certified application. Why you want to publish/see a separate list of such applications.

Over 750 Freedom Subtracted Applications?

Posted Apr 14, 2004 9:16 UTC (Wed) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

To be fair, Red Hat did specify enterprise applications. GNU Lilypond is a great application (that I use regularly), but typesetting music is not normally considered an enterprise application.

They're talking about stuff like enterprise databases (like MySQL or Oracle), or applications that need multi-user enterprise databases as back ends (like call-center applications, or stock-control / ordering / invoicing / customer management applications). And they must have a company behind them to go through the certification process. (At the moment, that seems to have ruled out GNUe, although I'm not sure that's really ready to go into this category).

This is traditional "you can trust our OS as a platform" marketing aimed at businesses. It has very little to do with whether the OS is Free Software or not: businesses are generally happy to accept the freedom as an added extra, but need to be happy with the technology before they will entrust their data and the smooth running of the company to it.

But it does seem to be incomplete from this angle, too: I know of a number of enterprise applications that are vendor-certified as working on Red Hat but aren't here.

In time, as the Free Software equivalents of all these programs become more available, and as companies spring up to provide support, they will have their own lists of compatible software, including operating systems.

And these lists will include trademark UNIX systems, and possibly Windows. One company might be running Oracle on Linux, while the one next door runs MySQL on AIX. Businesses will run what they believe to be best for them, whether Free or non-Free.

Ultimately, I believe businesses will come to see that Freedom guarantees competition in the support market and an on-going future for their software in the face of a company losing interest or going bust. And (the Open Source Initiative insight) business opinion will change, by experience, from non-Free being the norm and Free being a nice extra, to Free being expected, and non-Free looking dodgy. But it will probably take the bitter experience of more companies for this change to become widespread.

Over 750 Freedom Subtracted Applications?

Posted Apr 14, 2004 12:22 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

For what it worth, it is rather enterprise-backed applications rather than
enterprise applications. Apache and php are not mentionned, but MySQL is,
postgresSQL is not, etc...

Over 750 Applications Now Certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Posted Apr 14, 2004 10:51 UTC (Wed) by Switched (guest, #2475) [Link]

Oracle and Red Hat have collaborated to include numerous technology enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3, bringing Linux to a higher level of security, performance and ROI for mission critical environments.

Maybe I've missed something, but the above statement seems odd considering Oracle don't yet appear to list RH EL 3 as a supported platform.

http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/ias/files/9ias-certification-903.html