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.

Bologna!

[mkswap-notwar]

I really don't see this happening. Red Hat has a good presence in the server market, where as Ubuntu doesn't have that yet. I know Ubuntu is the "in" thing right now, but I don't see it toppling other vendors with established business models.

Uh huh

[Mr. Underbridge]

This coming from the same general crowd that claims that Linux on the desktop is going to take over Windows in "just a few years." This goes firmly in the "wishful thinking" category.

One reason that Ubuntu will never be accepted: they don't offer the things that make beancounters sleep well at night. They don't have an "enterprise edition." They give it away for free - it can't be any good, right?

Ultimately, Red Hat targets corporate clients. Ubuntu doesn't. And it's not like that's bad!

Re:Bologna!

[seb249]

It may not happen in the short term, but .. I do know that i used to use Red Hat for various purposes and when they changed to a corporate focus felt more than a little "ditched" as a customer. I did use to purchase Boxed sets and have been on a few of their training courses in the past.

Subsequently i have changed most the servers i take care of to Debian, and on the desktop I use Ubuntu.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. I dumped Red Hat after Fedora Core 4. The worst mistake Red Hat made was to fork the distro into a "we don't eat our own dog food distro." Back in the day when Red Hat was free for download I would actually buy their distro to help support them. When they went the Fedora Core route I was disappointed to say the least. If Red Hat wants to survive the coming Ubuntu storm they need to go back to the way they were before. It's not what is, but what is perceived and by forking like they did they turned a lot of people off to even installing their distro.

Re:No way in Hell

[zlogic]

Ubuntu was certified for IBM's db2: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/db2cert [ubuntu.com]
However I think Ubuntu will only be used in small companies as desktops. Most people I know use either FreeBSD or Windows 2003 as their server OS.

My prediction is that Novell will gain significant marketshare in the enterprise OS sector. Especially after all those Netware servers migrate to SuSE.
Also, Novell seems to support the non-enterprise users more than Redhat (and their Opensuse distro is much more stable than Fedora).

As both a bean counter and a programmer.....

[Anonymous Coward]

As both a bean counter and a programmer (yes, I've bother with a degree in each), I call bullshit.

As many have mentioned, a support base is a key demand for a for-profit company. Why is it wrong to want help to keep your systems up, it pays the bills for other techs too. Reliability in your IT infrastructure keeps up productivity, which in turn makes for revenues. So would you as the sysadmin rather use Red Hat and call them when something goes wrong (which you can tell upper management), or rather have to hope for a reply from the community or fix it yourself, all the while being hounded by upper management because it's not fixed and the company is loosing money?

Secondly, these /. responses are knee-jerk. "OH EM GEE, teh Red Hat is making teh profitz!!!111!one". Just because they've grown into an OSS company that wants to make it their living (aka get paid to do the work and have others paid to work for them), why should they be demonized? Wouldn't you want to work on your pet project all day and get paid for it (if you don't already)? What if you could also make a share of profits too? Can you say right here, right now, that you wouldn't do that?

I'm not saying their product hasn't gone downhill. I stopped using Red Hat shortly after Fedora. If they don't improve their product, then something will replace it down the road. But what will? No one knows, but I'm doubting Ubuntu, at least at the moment.

Re:Bologna!

[Peter La Casse]

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.

I'm in a similar situation as you, typically using Debian on servers and Ubuntu on the desktop, and a reason for switching to Ubuntu on the server did recently occur to me: if Debian continues this breakneck release pace (less than two years between releases? Egad!) then Ubuntu LTS might actually force less frequent upgrades.

Low end always wins

[countach]

The low end always wins (eventually)

PCs (nearly) killed mainframes. Windows nearly killed unix, until free unix came along. Linux is eating into windows server. Ubuntu is eating into Red Hat.

Eventually the mass market product overruns the corporate product, but it takes a lot of time.

Who says...

[camcorder]

Ubuntu is better than Fedora in Desktop Market? People keep saying, ubuntu is cool, but I really don't see why it is? To me it is torture. Worse than Fedora on default fonts selection, official repositories do not have recent versions of software. Fedora do not have meaningless patches for should be default and consistent interfaces (like nautilus, add panel dialog etc.) It's way easier to find rpm of a release than .deb version. Also what's the point of having something installed and waiting hours for internet download time, instead of downloading a DVD while you were sleeping, and get everything at once.

For me ubuntu is no more than a buzz word, which uses Debian as a source of fame.

Re:Ubuntu *has* paid enterprise support, people!

[jocknerd]

I was a professional Linux admin for 3 1/2 years. I ran Debian. Sure, we had one copy of Red Hat Enterprise because we purchased a library system that insisted on using Red Hat. But I preferred Debian. And if Ubuntu has paid support, it has a great future.

What kind of hand holding are you referring to? As a Debian user, I could say that Red Hat has a lot more hand holding than Debian does. Get off your Red Hat high horse.

Re:Funny thing about bean counters....

[gigne]

I wonder when the last time was that any company got Microsoft to fix *any* bug they found in a released version of software?

Last week in fact. We discovered (completely by accident) that Outlook Mobile Access had a certificate generation bug. Within a couple of days a M$ rep had called up us, and made available a patch for the issue.

It's amazing what a bit of corporate ear bending can do.

If only they did that for the 000's of other more critical bugs out there.

Re:Bologna!

[hexix]

I agree. I used RedHat in the early days and enjoyed it. I later moved on to Debian. Although it was more difficult (very little automagic configuration at the time), I found it more enjoyable to administer. This is almost entirely due to the existence of apt.

I still like to try out new distributions and new versions of old ones. However, the whole Fedora thing really turned me off. I did try it a few times, but it very much feels like an eternal beta. Every time I've tried Fedora there were insane problems that never ever should have made it to release. I'm not talking about Firefox crashing once in a while, I'm talking about Fedora not even booting because they decided they wanted to try out some special SE Linux stuff.

The other problem is I really don't see any progress from the Fedora camp. It seems like whenever I hear of a new feature getting bundled into a distro, it's always Ubuntu or Suse. I don't know what the hell Fedora has going on.

And here's the real point to all my rambling: I currently went through the process of buying managed servers for a company I work for. They only had the option of RHEL for linux servers, and I was stuck with it. But I really do not enjoy it. I am very much a Debian/Ubuntu user, and would prefer one of those. If there was a choice of some Ubuntu Server, you better believe I would have gone with that.

count me in

[Yonder Way]

I'm one of those alienated system administrators. I've been working with Red Hat as my primary $WORK distribution since 1997. This year I started putting Ubuntu on servers and find it to be so much less hassle. Each Ubuntu server saves my employer probably thousands of dollars a year not just in licensing costs but TCO as a whole. And the sysadmin team here actually enjoys working with it rather than griping like "WTF did RHAT do it that way?!?"

Red Hat will still be king in some markets but Ubuntu is going to eat its lunch in the mainstream in the next few years if they don't make some major changes to their business model soon.

Re:Bologna!

[bogado]

well the article assumes that everyone that uses Ubuntu for the desktop will fall in love with it and never look fedora to fedora again. But my experience is not like that. When I first came to linux I studied witch version I would use, I quickly saw two option, debian and redhat. Without a good connection, I ordered both from "cheap bytes". Tryed both, but with debian I almost didn't pass the installation pass, it was spartan. Redhat in the other hand was quite easy and I got confortable with the OS very quickly.

So I was a redhat user. I didn't like when the fedora was launched, but keep with. FC1 was launched and then FC2 and FC3, by the time FC4 was out I was hearing all those background noises, "ubuntu is cool", "ubunto this", "ubuntu that", so I gave it a try. I downloaded the instalation and gave it a try.

I spended most of the FC4 time using ubuntu, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't that much better. It did came with some drivers that redhat refuses to bundle, but on the other hand it did not have "mp3" and other MM in the same way that redhat din't. But the worst part was to develop with Ubuntu...

First I had to install the compilers that did not installed in the first round, ok compilers are a specific need and should not be installed in the generic desktop instalation, fedora also do not install those by default. But ubuntu did not gave me a choice to install them. The second head ache was with compiling gnome stuff, I had to install every gnome library 'dev' package by hand, a never ending task since there is aways another one that you forgot...

But I had it when I installed the motif, first I had the same problem that I had with the gnome devel. But until now I was patient and thought "sure this is a one time thing". But then I discovered that the package that had the Xt* development had not bundled the man pages, so I didn't have the man pages a 100% necessary tool. So I go to ubuntu's bug site and search the DB, I find a bug filled with this problem and the solution is "fixed for the next version". So a packeger did a mistake, ok fine everyone does them. But not updating the packaging until the next version, is an abuse. This fix would not step on anyother package toe, it should have been updated as soon as it was found. So I had to live without those man pages, the package didn't even showed up in the backports.

So what happened? I am now using FC5. I was not pleased with ubuntu, it was a nice desktop and all and I see why many people love it and may even try it again in the future, but for now I will keep going with my fedora experience.

Re:Bologna!

[blackest_k]

while ubuntu does give you a cd with an automatic lamp install

it might be of interest how to do it manually.

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.0 6 [howtoforge.com]

        * Web Server: Apache 2.0
        * Database Server: MySQL 5.0
        * Mail Server: Postfix
        * DNS Server: BIND9
        * FTP Server: proftpd
        * POP3/IMAP: I will use Maildir format and therefore install Courier-POP3/Courier-IMAP.
        * Webalizer for web site statistics

one to book mark for later i think.

Re:Bologna!

[Jerry]

For many of them, paying someone to be accountable is worth the rather small licensing fees.

Who's accountable?

Not Microsoft. Not any of the PC OEMs that include Windows on the products. Not Novell. Not any Linux distro I am aware of.

EVERY ONE OF THEM have disclaimers the limit their liability to $5 or less and put the entire onus on the user. No one has successfully sued Microsoft because they lost data or revenue when their Windows servers or desktops crashed. I am not aware of RH or any FOSS project losing a lawsuit filed by a user because of any problems they had using the OS or software.

So, exactly what accountability is someone buying when they pay for a subscription or a License?

Essentially, they are paying for a skilled voice at the other end of a phone line, or a reasonably timed professional response to an email asking for help. That service can be purchased independently of an OS or application, but even then those services have contractual escapes from "accountability" for any problems caused by using their service, or any software or hardware they support.

Having previously purchased a RHELS 3.0 one year subscription for $750, I can say that my experience with their support was not even as good as doing a google search for an answer to the questions I had. In fact, when RH support came back with an answer three business days later their solution was contained in two URLs, both of which I had located on my own within 20 minutes and before I posted my request for RH support. My son, the Oracle DBA, says that in his experience paid Oracle support is an oxymoron. He regularly uses Google and free, user maintained Oracle forums to solve problems.

Other organizations may give better support. I've found that Trolltech, for example, gives excellent support for their commerical QT products. But, YMMV.

All in all, the best and fastest support are the user forums and Google.

Actually I do see it happening...here's why

[WheelDweller]

I'm a LONG TIME Redhat fan. I started at 4.0 and stayed on until FC4. There are several things that Redhat has stopped doing, owed to their business-school strategy that just doesn't work, here.

XCDRoast: the author of this program has his stuff together; he makes it available for many distros and in most places it works, but at Redhat they see fit to edit the code to get along with their SUID plan. It works, but are they going to shoehorn all packages like this? There are _thousands_.

LDAP: the OpenLDAP rpm that comes from the Fedora repo is at least 2 major releases old. Worse than that, it breaks. And it breaks in a way that leaves it completely useless. But I suppose that since they bought Netscape Directory, a bloated, oversized, shotgun-approach to flyswatting, they won't allow anyone to bring the smaller, tighter core product up to speed. In short, if you need LDAP, you use ND or recompile your own from a tarball. Hey, they've got a business to run!

And all those Linux games we *bought* hoping to keep Loki alive? You'll have to fight to make them work, and each time the libraries get upgraded, you'll need to fight'em again. Not in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has some strengths that are surprisingly wonderful. Very little translation (if ANY) from author to end-user. Using a *better* package manager, rolling projects in, editing the configs, and rolling them back out are painless. No dependency problems.

LDAP lives in /etc/ldap and installs with enough "database" to get you started. Even without the nice LDAP GUI that Redhat made, I think this might be simpler and quicker. No complications, no stupid Java behemoth, just good native code like it should be.

Remember those Loki games? Check the docs for the details; it's, as they say in these parts, "Breezy". :)

Their DOCUMENTATION. It's a Wiki. Not stuffy paperwork that never seems to be complete enough, or out of date. It's a living, growing document that helps us all enjoy the experience. Reading these docs made the LDAP install close-to-instantaneous. It made the Loki libraries the same way. It showed me in far more simple ways how to deal with Apache, which I thought I understood before.

I think it's because Ubuntu has no commercial bias; no reason to do anything other than the author's intentions with their code. There's no reason to do something that you and I don't need, because they have to make a headline. THIS is the right way to do Linux.

I've tried telling them at Redhat, but won't hear me.

Just like TribalVoice with PowWow, just like PCNews or whatever it was, and just like SCO, before they were sold to a (now dying) entity. But the Redhat-of-old was a warm friendly place for many of us to get started, and I'm thankful for that. Now Ubuntu can truly take us into the future, to do even bigger, brighter things!