Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise?

Tony Mobily has written a thought-provoking editorial for Free Software Magazine that makes the bold prediction of Red Hat's eventual demise at the hands of Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. Calling on memories of Red Hat alienating their desktop user base to focus on their corporate customers and making money, Mobily states that many of those alienated desktop users are also system administrators who now feel more comfortable with Ubuntu and will make the choice to use Ubuntu Server over Red Hat now and in the future.

Re:Uh huh

[Scarblac]

But there is a company behind Ubuntu - Canonical [canonical.com]. They offer professional support for those who want it. Of course, Red Hat is much larger, more entrenched and more experienced, but I think that outside of the US the situation isn't as clear cut.

Ubuntu *has* paid enterprise support, people!

[cloudmaster]

Why do so many people say that Ubuntu's not acceptable to enterprise because it doesn't have support, there's no one to blame, etc? Has no one ever gone to ubuntu.com and seen that big friggin' link at the top of the front page, which says "support"?

http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid [ubuntu.com]

Alternatively, has anyone ever actually used RedHat support? *I* wasn't impressed...

Re:As a former long time user of Red Hat....

[c_forq]

I don't know, I think it is fine how it is. You have Fedora Core for testing and for more desktop type use (things get updated faster) and if you don't want to pay for Red Hat then you can always go with Cent OS.

Re:Uh huh

[cortana]

Canonical, Shuttleworth's company, will support it.

Why I can't switch yet

[DoofusOfDeath]

One advantage Fedora has over Ubuntu is that Fedora releases a multi-disk set of packages. I work with computers that can't connect to the Internet, and I've found that the Fedora CDs almost always have all the packages I need. That's a huge benefit for those computers.

I guess I could be saved by utility that analysis the entire set of packages I'd need in order to install a given package on my computer. If I had a utility like that, I could walk over to an Internet-connected computer, download those packages onto a CD-R, and then install them on the computer that can't connect to the Internet. Or.... Ubuntu could start putting together CD/DVD sets that contained a larger fraction of popular packages than they can fit on one CD. Either development would let me kick Fedora out of the picture.

Re:Bologna!

[StonePiano]

I really don't see this happening.
Well it pretty much happened to me.

I was using Redhat 6, 7, and 8 on my desktop and therefore any servers I installed. A couple of years ago I tried Ubuntu and stuck with it. (Admittedly, I'm a little embarrassed that it has now become so fashionable. But that's not a substantial reason to turn away from something that works and is getting much better by the release.)

Now, my kids run Edubuntu, I run Ubuntu, and any mid-size server I install (which is all I do) is Ubuntu also.

Re:Wrong Target

[molarmass192]

Are you on fucking crack? Have you EVER sold Linux to an executive oversight committee? That's rhetorical question because you haven't. There are only 2 names that non-tech senior execs recognize, RedHat and Novell. You put Ubuntu on a powerpoint slide and your sales pitch is in the drink. The fact is, what you use at home has very little to do with what is used in the enterprise. I brefly tried to sell SuSE to the same types of people before the Novell acquisition and it was always a "we know what RedHat is, we'll sign off on that" situation. With the Novell aquisition, SuSE finally managed to get traction. Ubuntu will never get there unless they find a way to sell their brand to non-geeks, the ones who sign the POs.

Re:Why I can't switch yet

[nCorax]

There are also Ubuntu DVD iso's available, full of 3.6Gb of packages. (If you can burn and install from DVD's, that is...)
http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/DVDs/ubun tu/6.06/release/ [anl.gov]

Re:I want to move to Ubuntu

[fimbulvetr]

Install from the "Alternate CD" to get text based install, and disable ACPI and APIC (Should be help in the options menu for those, I forget what they are) just in case.

You may have to go to a console and do "hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdc" to disable dma on your cdrom if you have lots of read errors in your dmesg.

Re:Bologna!

[morgan_greywolf]

That being said I have no reason to look from Debian to ubuntu in the server space but newer Linux admins may find it appropriate.

Yeah. In the server space, there really isn't much difference between Ubuntu and Debian. They use the same base packages, for the most part. Ubuntu's differentiation is on the desktop, and Ubuntu is a very polished desktop distro. That being said, check out the new Ubuntu Server that was released with Dapper. It's got automatic LAMP installation, which is nice and saves the trouble of manually integrating a LAMP stack.

Re:clueless users

[octaene]

Pretty myopic view there, muftak. Red Hat was popular because it was so widely available. By widely available, I mean to users who might've otherwise not heard of Linux (or Slackware, or Debian, or whatever). Red Hat makes money on corporate support, so it stands to reason that corporate users are interested in not only what they get in the box, but the support they receive from the vendor.

Not gonna happen

[Schmots]

I am a linux SA for a fortune 250 company. We use RedHat on 500 servers, not cause I like that distrobution the most, but because its certified with our applications, jboss, oracle, webjet, etc. We can't do billion dollar database transactions and be SOX compliant with out being able to show certifications of applications. Thats just how it is folks

Re:Bologna!

[avdp]

I don't know about Ubuntu specifically, but there is no doubt in my mind that RH made a very bad move, and that all the other Linux vendors will collectively benefit from it. I used to be a big RedHat fan. I have installed every version since 5.1, I owned stock at some point, I was RHCE certified (company paid for it), I paid for RHN licenses for my personal boxes at home (partly for convenience, partly to support a worthy company), and even got the company to buy a few support contracts for servers at work. When they changed their business model, I looked elsewhere, and I haven't looked back. At work, we're still using RH 7.3 to this day but looking at finally upgrading. Guess what? It won't be a RedHat product. Stuff like that happens when you alienate the little people - they're the ones influencing the decisions.

I hope someone from Redhat still reads Slashdot and this post.

Red Hat, Centos, Ubuntu, Suse...

[Savage-Rabbit]

Redhat's enterprise support is a joke, they will find any excuse to not "support your configuration".
When I call Novell, I talk to actual engineers who can help me, not some dipship $5.15/hr college student who is reading from a queue card.

Generally I agree that RedHat is a crappy product compared to other Linuxes like Ubuntu and Suse. The flip side is that with Novell i.e. Suse AFAIK you don't have a project like Centos, which is binary compatible with the RedHat ES/AS product but is free and you get patches. This can be an advantage if you want to create a test setup for a product has been certified for RedHat ES/AS but are on a shoestring budget and don't want the hassle of dealing with the issues that can arrise if you try to install that same prodcut on Fedora or Ubuntu. Oracle products are a case in point. Installations of Oracle Application server, Database... the list goes on... that go without a hitch on RedHat ES/AS and Centos can be problematic on Fedora. Pracitcally every manufacturer of commercial Linux software certifies his products to work with certain versions of RedHat ES/AS so it is hard to avoid using Red Hat unless you are willing to put in the extra time it takes to debug an installation of your RedHat certified Linux software on an uncertified Linux distro.

Re:Who says...

[decadre]

Ubuntu does actually have a DVD available for download with over 3 gig of stuff on it.....No waiting for hours required!

Re:Bologna!

[zukakog]

I wouldn't touch a Linux box that's more than a year old.

Ever heard of security updates? I've got some Linux boxen that are more that a few years old. They're just as secure as any new box that I set up. They automatically download any security updates, and save the old configuration incase I need to revert. With Debian 'speeding up' their releases, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS(Long Tearm Service) is looking better to the parent poster. They are guaranteeing 5 years of security support for that version. That means that your box won't have "code that is more than a year old" where it counts.

Oh, please.

[FishWithAHammer]

I meant a choice during the install procedure, when I finish a install of fedora I can have my system correctly installed with all the options I need, gcc, dev packages and etc.

Yes, because how hard is it to pop open a terminal and type the following lines to solve your problem:

apt-get install gcc-4.0
apt-get install make
apt-get build-dep gnome

There ya go--all the gnome-dev headers, gcc, and make. Just about EVERY program in the Ubuntu and Debian repositories honors build-dep.

Also if the program is already packaged I usually don't need to compile it, so the apt-get command you refered is not very usefull, but it is good to know it exists. :-D

See above. Obviously build-dep would be useful in the very circumstance you mentioned in your previous point.

Re:Bologna!

[Anonymous Coward]

But ubuntu did not gave me a choice to install them.

Sure it did. It just didn't give you the choice at exactly the same time as you were used to. Immediately after it brings up the installed desktop, simply launch Synaptic and select the compilers.