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

From:		Joe Klemmer <klemmerj@webtrek.com>
To:		letters@lwn.net
Subject:		Re: Red Hat as the "next Redmond"
Date:		29 Aug 2002 13:53:18 -0400


> 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. 

-- 
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation.
We have assumed control.

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Re: Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Sep 5, 2002 13:46 UTC (Thu) by tres (guest, #352) [Link]

What people are upset about is Redhat making decisions (as with gcc) that the rest of the GNU/Linux users have not jumped to. There are some things that are Redhat compatible but not compatible with other GNU/Linux distros for reasons that are more complicated than the files are in the wrong place. We all want GNU/Linux distros to be compatible with one another. RH's gcc decision is annoying but when companies start to support RH to the exclusion of GNU/linux in general creates a divide within the community.

Tres

Re: Red Hat as the "next Redmond"

Posted Sep 5, 2002 19:48 UTC (Thu) by x_nc (guest, #2633) [Link]

WRT the gcc issue, it turned out to be a non-issue. RH was right in using the version they shipped and now that the main line gcc has settled into something that is stable you will see RH 8.0 ship with it. There are things that other distros have made decisions on that RH has not jumped to and they aren't any more or less "Redmondized" that RH.

Right now, with the LSB finally here and the current ease of repackaging software (i.e. rpm <-> deb <-> pkg) Linux is becoming more cohesive than fractured.

The bottom line is that Linux, by it's very nature, will not allow any company or group to co-opt it in the way that MS has with WinXX. To think that ANY company or group could be compared to MS is absurd.

Standardizing on RH - not everybody.

Posted Sep 6, 2002 13:11 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

Heh... funny that you mention gov't agencies etc standardizing on Red Hat. The only government agency (sort-of) I've heard about doing a significant linux deployment here in Australia has been AuDA, the DNS administration authority. They're using Mandrake for their Oracle db servers and Bind9 DNS servers. Weird, eh - given Mandrake's traditional focus on the desktop / workstation with a lot of work on GUI tools.

Then again, very few organisations here in Australia are using linux (officially). The company I work for only uses linux for peripheral server tasks like DHCP and minor web apps - but we may be doing a linux _client_ deployment this coming year :-)