Oracle is being more than flaky. They have a history of being antagonistic to free software and that has not changed since taking over Sun. Many Sun people were fired and there was much bad blood. People are right to be suspicious, until Oracle proves otherwise. OpenSolaris was killed off early on. Instead Solaris is being developed behind closed doors so we don't even know what is happening if anything. MySQL is in doubt since Oracle's bread and butter is in proprietary databases. It is likely to languish. OpenOffice is in trouble. Many developers left and started LibreOffice when Oracle did not sound enthusiastic enough about development. At the very least, this will fragment the OpenOffice community. Major distributions such as Ubuntu have already said they will support LibreOffice. The lone good project seems to be VirtualBox which Oracle seems to be embracing, IMO.
Novell is far from solid, having just been taken over by Attachmate and pieces being old off the a consortium that includes Microsoft. People are leaving and nobody knows where this is headed. The future of SLED is very much in doubt. I am not suggesting that it is folding, just in major flux, and that I would not jump into something in the midst of a major shift without both eyes open. Red Hat is consistent. It is business as usual. They just released RHEL 6. CENTOS, a derivative that removes Red Hat branding and adds its own, is also strong; proof that this model is working. There are several other players as well, so there is enough to go around. Roy Using Kubuntu 10.10, 64-bit Location: Canada On 27 December 2010 10:09, Daniel Eggleston <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 8:41 AM, six-pack to be <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> Would you please help me understand the following: >> 1- Novel's site claims: >> 2- Sun claims >> Lastly where does Red Hat stand? > > I would posit that it makes no difference. Every bit of what you've > described sounds like marketing hype that is meaningless to the final > installed system. All three are solid software distributions, with strong > backing and fantastic support (if you pay for it). Sun has the stigma that > Oracle is being a little... flaky, but they've been great in the past, and > have a large commercial base - so I don't see Oracle writing off Solaris > anytime soon. > > Find the applications (or application types) that you need. Check for > support for SuSE, RedHat, and Solaris (you mentioned Sun, I assume > Solaris). If any of the three are not supported by your application's > vendor, then write them off. If all of them are supported by your > application vendors, start looking at OS support (namely, software technical > support available from RedHat, Sun, or Novell). My guess is that they all > will offer very similar levels of support, but there may be a price > difference. > > Also, all three have a free version available - so try them out, see which > one is the most comfortable to you. If you hate using yum, it doesn't > matter whether RedHat is supported by your software vendors, since you won't > want to install software using RedHat's package manager. Same goes for > YaST/SuSE and whatever goes on with Solaris (very little experience there). > > None will be a magic bullet (everything to all people), which is why you > will constantly hear "try them out!". That's the beauty of free software > that you can get with paid support... try before you buy. > > -- > > Daniel > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users > Group. > To post a message, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] > For more options, visit our group at > http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup
