Red Hat as the "next Redmond" [LWN.net]

By now, many readers are likely to have encountered this eWeek article comparing Red Hat to Microsoft. It includes nice quotes like:

"There is a backlash against Red Hat from many consumers and government agencies, who fear it is increasingly becoming the Microsoft of the Linux world with respect to its dominance and attitude," said David Turek, IBM vice president of Linux Clusters, in Somers, N.Y.

Is this "backlash" real, and should it be?

Red Hat is certainly the Linux distributor with the highest profile and the most evident success. But success does not make a monopoly. To justify charges like this, it is necessary to point out where Red Hat has tried to use its strong market position to force out competitors and extract monopoly prices from its customers. So let's look at a few things from Red Hat's record:

Red Hat continues to sell a 100% free distribution which anybody can download for free. The "advanced server" product is not available for download, but it remains free software; anybody with the interest and time could reproduce it (including things like Red Hat's kernel patches) and make it available. Red Hat's customers are probably not feeling the squeeze too badly at this point.
The company employs a large number of high-profile free software developers. These developers collaborate with developers employed by other distributors on a regular basis, and make their work available to everybody, including competitors.
Development versions of Red Hat's distribution are made available to users (and competitors) through beta releases and the "Rawhide" distribution (though you have to know where to look to find it). It is difficult to be surprised by the contents of a new Red Hat release.

This is not the sort of behavior that one normally expects to see coming out of Redmond.

Anybody wanting to criticize Red Hat need not look too far. It would be nice if the company had supported the Linux Professional Institute rather than creating its own certification program. The company's software patent policy is not to everybody's liking. Red Hat has pushed its users toward bleeding-edge versions of gcc while providing (and requiring) ancient versions of Python. They have blown a couple of attempts at coordinated, multi-distributor security updates with too-early releases. And so on.

Complaints like these, however, show only that Red Hat is not perfect. But every free software user has benefitted greatly from Red Hat's work, and will continue to do so, whether or not they have ever bought anything from Red Hat. Linux users are not suffering under the yoke of some Red Hat monopoly, and it is difficult to see how such a monopoly could develop anytime soon.

Charges that Red Hat is the next Microsoft look more like FUD designed to divide the Linux community against itself than like anything based in fact. Let's keep an eye on Red Hat - all free software companies can benefit from some vigilance to keep them honest. But let's not get taken in by people trying to create fears of a monopolist where none exists.

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Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 27, 2002 17:12 UTC (Tue) by ctg (subscriber, #3459) [Link]

Well said.

The one point that I don't think you've addressed - which is perhaps the most annoying one, is when a third party says "Requires Red Hat Linux" for their software to run. However,

The LSB should solve this
The software is inevitably proprietry

Now that Red Hat is LSB compliant (and one of the first) this is a criticism that should be leveled at the the ISV, not Red Hat. Secondly, it encourages you to find an Open Source/Free Software solution to the problem. Which isn't a bad thing.

So, Red Hat isn't the problem - but their success and the way third party vendors of closed source software solutions have reacted to their success is the real problem.

Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 27, 2002 18:42 UTC (Tue) by dbhost (guest, #3461) [Link]

The only issue that appears to make Red Hat similar to Redmond's beast is that many vendors that do support Linux, only support "Red Hat Linux" and it is usually two or so versions back. However with distributions such as Red Hat and Mandrake obtaining LSB certification, I would hope they support and disclaimers will read something more akin to "Requires LSB compliant Linux distribution".
I like Red Hat. It is a good OS. But as much as I like Red Hat, I love my Mandrake system.

Funny thing. Most of the Linux users I personally know use the following distros.
Mandrake (the majority of the users)
Debian
SuSe
Slackware
And that is about it. Not a Red Hat user in the bunch. I know they have a lot of really sweet deals with big computer vendors and with large companies. But I wonder what percentage of the market Red Hat really owns. And in the long run, who cares? Red Hat doesn't appear to be running interference with anybodies ability to chose a different distro, so why worry about it?

Market per centage

Posted Aug 29, 2002 21:19 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

>Funny thing. Most of the Linux users I personally know use ...

>Not a Red Hat user in the bunch. I know they have a lot of really sweet
>deals with big computer vendors and with large companies. But I wonder
>what percentage of the market Red Hat really owns

The market is measured in dollars, not persons, and I suspect your friends are virtually invisible to people selling products that interoperate with Linux. I bet the Red Hat-based share of the market for Linux-compatible stuff is comparable to the Microsoft-based share of the market for computer-compatible stuff.

LSB won't change anything

Posted Aug 29, 2002 21:14 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I rather doubt that LSB will make a difference here. In most the cases where only Red Hat Linux is supported, the product in theory works on plenty of other systems that call themselves "linux," and the vendor could easily list specific things in the environment it requires.

But a vendor likes to test with something as close as possible to anything he is supporting. He wants to write instructions and train technical support people specific to all the details of the system, not just the ones in LSB.

Since even with LSB, the vendor knows that if he further restricts the product to Red Hat Linux he will still cover the vast majority of his market, that's what he will do.

Besides, "LSB" systems will deviate from LSB, even if by mistake. In those cases, a vendor wants his product to be bug compatible with Red Hat.

Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 27, 2002 19:23 UTC (Tue) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

Well, except that you can't install python2 as python or all the redhat
config programs break in heinous ways ... they require 1.5.2 for their
python code (and expect 'python' to be 1.5.2) ...

jake

Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 29, 2002 15:57 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

If you're using python 2 features in your scripts, you should probably invoke it with #!python2 anyway, so that it fails in a more obvious way for people who don't have 2.x

Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 27, 2002 19:23 UTC (Tue) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

Red Hat has pushed its users toward bleeding-edge versions of gcc while providing (and requiring) ancient versions of Python.

I'd like to comment further on the Python situation. The reason that Red Hat has used 1.5.2 for the longest time now is that some of the system tools that they ship as part of the 7.x series use Python, and Red Hat has a policy of not breaking compatibility within a major number series. Seeing that they're targeting the "enterprise" market they don't want to do this too often. So Python has been lagging far behind while waiting for gcc 3.2 to be released so that Red Hat can ship a new major number series. It was just bad luck that Python 2 wasn't ready for Red Hat 7.0.

Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 28, 2002 11:43 UTC (Wed) by MGPoolman (guest, #3469) [Link]

.
.
.
Incorrect, about python anyway. RedHat 7(.3) includes both python(1) and python2.

Well yes, but a lot of rh sysadmin tools need python1.5.2, and if you use python2.x in parallel you end up having to solve all kinds of interesting problems you'd never thought of before. Red Hat really should get their act together and update said tools.

Re: Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 29, 2002 17:49 UTC (Thu) by x_nc (guest, #2633) [Link]

There is a backlash against Red Hat from many consumers and government agencies...

What?!? I missed this the first time around. I work with many "Government Agencies" and they are damn near standardizing on Red Hat. I know there's a backlash in the Linux "Power User" community but, as I said on some other site which I can't remember, it's more related to the "fight the establishment" attitude in the Software Libre community.

See, the reason many people moved to Linux is because it was "radical". Now that Red Hat is seen as the main Linux vendor it is now look upon as the establishment. If SuSE or Caldera or any distro vendor were in the same position now that Red Hat is in you would see the same backlash against them.

Red Hat is not the "next Redmond"

Posted Aug 29, 2002 22:36 UTC (Thu) by KeineHeimat (guest, #2154) [Link]

Redmond is a world wide monopoly.

RedHat is strong in the USA, SuSE in Germany (used by the government), Mandrake in France (used by the government, AFAIK) and RedFlag in China (initiated by the government, most people there, AFAIK).

And nobody knows, how strong Debian really is (as it can't be rated by 'market share').

Maybe the one or other distribution may use a different compiler as default, but also in this 'evil' case: 'use the source, Luke'.

No problem anywhere beside of Redmond, I'd say ;-)