[NTLUG:Discuss] Redhat Offerings -- the Red Hat bashing tour isback!

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 07:59:10PM -0700, Kevin Hulse wrote:
> 
> Yes, and a minimum of 90% of it was donated from 
> other parties. That's a critical fact to remember
> when keeping this in perspective.
> 
> The value of their own trademark is built on the
> work of others.

Go build and maintain your own full distro, and then tell me if there is
value in what Red Hat does.  Yes, they contribute back to the community
quite a bit, and yes, their product is entirely based around open sourced
code.  But their product is less the code itself, and more the support, QA,
and integration work behind building supporting and maintaining a distro.
I think you will find SuSE/Turbolinux/Gentoo/Debian/"insert your favorite
distro here" feel the same way.  They take from the community, they all
give back to the community, but what they are selling is the integration of
the 1000+ packages in the typical distro.  They are selling the QA and
testing, and large amounts of time which go into making a solid release.
They are selling the security patches and other errata which need to be
done in a timely manner.  And they are selling the large amounts of
infrastructure required to distribute this OS and updates.

You might say that the community assists with all of these things, and we
do.  But it takes financial backing to provide the infrastructure, and it
takes a large amount of tedious work to get a stable release out of the
door, which people rarely want to do just for the satisfaction of it (look
at the Debian stable release cycle).  It takes a lot of commitment to get
security patches integrated. somewhat QAed, and out the door in a timely
manner, and if someone is out of town for a couple of weeks, you are still
vulnerable, so there has to be backup.  These are things which Red
Hat/SuSE/(insert distro here) provide, and where they provide value.

Now I do tend to defend Red Hat quite a bit because I think the changes
they have made of recent have been a very good thing, which tend to get a
bad rap because they are poorly misunderstood by the media, and poorly
represented even by RH Sales people.  I think they are responsible open
source citizens, and generally do the right thing with regards to the open
source development community.  I do not think they are above criticism
there are definately places where things could improve, but overall, they
are a good distribution, and good open source citizens.  

This is the joy of open source, and in my opinion it's biggest value.  You
have the right to your opinion regarding the value that they provide. If
you do not think they are providing you a value anymore, or feel that
someone else would offer more value, switch.  And because it is Linux, you
will most likely be able to utilize the same hardware, and the same
applications you are currently running.  Most distributions are LSB
compliant these days.  You are not locked in simply because you want to run
application foo, or run on hardware x.

> X server or GL implementation. Linux needs an ultra
> cheap pricepoint. Redhat as the Linux figurehead for
> the unwashed masses consequently needs to have a an
> ultra cheap entry pricepoint.
> 
> Otherwise, it makes the rest of Linux look bad. This
> is simply one of the negative side effects of an
> "uber" distribution. It's not as if no one predicted
> this. 
> 
I do not see this.  Linux needs to meet a large variety of market needs.
>From the embedded user to the datacenter server, home and corporate users
alike.  I personally think that Red Hat serves a fairly large segment of
these markets with Fedora and RHEL.  There are gaps, but not too many.
Again, my feelings, you are entitled to your own, and free to use any Linux
distro you choose.  There are many good ones out there.
> 
> Fedora != Redhat.
> 
> This isn't about "free beer", it's about sound
> business planning and building and maintaining 
> the brand with the PHBs.
> 
I guess it depends on what your PHB wants... From what I have seen moer of
the fortune 500 customers feel more confident in the RHEL direction than
the old RHL model.  Again, if the brand no longer floats your boat, you are
free to choose one that does, and with guarantee of a relatively painless
migration.

Justin