Sunday, September 30th, 2007, 4:28 am
Red Hat’s All Right!
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OW here’s a company that has so far shown that you can make a lot of money without annoying the community, without doing proprietary stuff (RHEL code is still available if you jump through hoops), and without strutting around in suits, commissioning ‘studies’, and making kitschy adverts.
If you think that Red Hat’s business is plateauing, you’re focusing on the wrong area. It’s not about middleware (e.g. JBoss). Global Desktop is coming next month and Red Hat already has an agreement for deployments (Australia at the least, probably with H-P and other OEMs/ VARs). If Red Hat can do on the desktop what it has done in the server room, then the future is bright for digital independence. Ubuntu (Canonical) also leaves me optimistic.
For the record, this is not “O/S war”. This is not a “my dick is bigger than yours” thing. It’s about freedom, which isn’t the case in an Apple vs. Microsoft debate (both are proprietary and lock-in oriented). Microsoft sees Linux as war and treats it in this way using propaganda (blatantly anti-Free software advertisements). It’s time to demand change.
October 5th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I must say I am very excited about RHGD, even though I’ll stick with Fedora – it’s about time that RH based distros were brought back into the limelight.
And no, it’s not an OS war – I’m more than happy to see any GNU/Linux distro succeed (except those that are part of Microsoft’s protection racket, of course).
But I have been a dedicated RH user and developer for a very long time, and I was sorely disappointed when Red Hat’s personal desktop line disappeared (although I didn’t think RH8 or RH9 were especially great distros … RH7.3 was a pretty tough act to follow).
So it’ll be interesting to see how the market pans out, once Ubuntu (and Suse in particular) get some serious commercial desktop competition … again.