On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 03:51:22AM +0800, Andy Sy wrote: > "Sun does seem to have a beef with Red Hat; that much was obvious from > our conversation. Jonathan believes that Red Hat's ways in the > business are not fully honest.
Eben Moglen's not breathing down their backs demanding GPL compliance, is he? All of their code is open, so much so that people can and have made clones of Red Hat Enterprise that are byte for byte identical to the real thing. > He believes that Red Hat locks Enterprise customers in, just like > Microsoft does, by steadily moving away from the LSB, Do you actually think Red Hat will sue anyone who tries to follow their lead in non-LSB compliance? We just wind up having two standards, the LSB and the Red Hat standard. It's a big headache for system administrators in the short term, but in the long run, one of these will dominate and it won't matter, because Red Hat will not prevent anyone from following their lead. > by patching and forking code (including using a very non-standard > Linux kernel) A very non-standard Linux kernel alright, but still in full compliance with the GPL. The sources are fully available for anyone to see. How that promotes vendor lock-in is hard to see. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3342671 This seems like a good article covering the very issue, with opinions from the various movers and shakers of the Open Source/Free Software world. The reaction seems for the most part generally positive, but with some conditions. Bruce Perens for one, takes a dim view of this practice, but doesn't think it's such a big issue because the kernel is GPL-licensed no matter what Red Hat does. Think what you will of Richard Stallman, but his license has definitely saved the day here. The situation would be far worse if we were working with the BSD license. > and so applications get certified or only work in the Red Hat codebase > and no other Linux distro. I cannot think of any important proprietary apps that are certified with Red Hat that are not also certified with SuSE. These proprietary application vendors will certify to anyone who has the time, money, and expertise to do so, because it is in their interest to ensure that their applications run on the widest number of platforms available. I seriously doubt that Oracle, or some other company like them, would sign an agreement with Red Hat prohibiting any other distro makers from obtaining certification. > Such an example is Oracle, where they do not support any Linux distro > other than Red Hat-based ones. False. SuSE has certified their enterprise distros with Oracle too, and anyone with the time and money to go through Oracle's certification process can have their own certified setup. It does cost a lot of money, so only these enterprise players have actually gone and done it. > Jonathan believes that Red Hat, by differentiating the code so much, > has created its own incompatible platform, and is therefore virtually > pushing customers to continue use Red Hat instead of Debian or Gentoo > or other [Linux distro]" > Debian and Gentoo do not have the resources to get, say, an Oracle certification, and perform the continuing process of recertification against kernel and other system patches done to fix critical stability and security problems. The same is true of enterprise hardware. I love Debian and Gentoo and all, but frankly, anyone who tries to run them on enterprise hardware and expects to be supported is smoking a particularly nasty form of crack. Support actually is what enterprise systems are all about. Nothing but the lack of support prevents you from doing any and all of these things you mention on any Linux distribution of your choice. You may very easily install Oracle on Gentoo, Debian, or any random Linux distribution of your choice, and chances are it will run properly, but you cannot expect Oracle to help if you should run into problems. For an enterprise system this is totally unacceptable. > Such comments echo all the stuff I've always had in the back of my > mind wrt Red Hat. > > Questions are: I wonder how many people on this list feel the same way > and are turned off by Red Hat? Turned off by Red Hat, yes. But not for the reasons you mention. A license for Red Hat Enterprise is awfully expensive, so much so it is getting more complicated to justify TCO when a W2K3 server license is actually cheaper in absolute dollar terms. Their divergence from the standards is also a major annoyance to system administrators, as I've previously mentioned. > And for those PLUGgers who do use Red Hat extensively, do you feel > there is a growing schism between RH and the other Linux distros? Again, nothing prevents people from slavishly copying Red Hat's "standards". -- We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elemnts profoundly depend on science and technology. We've also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology... http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
