I disagree, I think there are several valid reasons to be annoyed by Red Hat's latest move. Most of which have to do with running Red Hat in an enterprise environment.
Why should third parties develop for an ever changing platform? Already it's hard enough to convince them that there is a large enough user base, now try and explain to them that there will be a major version change at seemingly random times. How on Earth does this look in the least bit professional? Was 8.0 the beta for 9.0? Six months for a major version number? This comes off as a poor management decision, it makes Red Hat appear unstable. Between their release of a bunch of "enterprise" distributions, the recent cut off of rhn and two major releases in six months, Red Hat looks desperate for sources of income. Big corporations won't base their infrastructure on a company that doesn't look like it's going to be around next year. Why would I want to support another distribution? I was only now starting to place 8.0 in non critical systems, now you expect me to support 7.X, 8.X, and 9.X. And don't give me the "they have AS for that" argument, show me the company that will pay for AS for a nameserver and I'll show you a company going out of business next week. Red Hat can leverage administrators familiarity with their product to sell the AS product line for mission critical systems such as Oracle Databases, but if Red Hat decides to shoot itself in the foot like Caldera did, don't think I won't switch distributions in a second. I was planning on becoming a RHCE, but this is seriously giving me second thoughts. Even if Red Hat extends the length of their certification what's the point? "I'm certified on Red Hat 9.0", "oh well we're using Red Hat 12.0 here so that doesn't mean much" And don't laugh, the guys that actually give weight to certifications are the same guys that think like this. Linux distributions often just don't seem to get it, RH will never be Microsoft, they won't even be Sun, Red Hat is in a prime position to take the lion's share of enterprise Linux, and make some decent money in doing so, I fail to see the point of shenanigans like this. Jared On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 19:41, Ed Wilts wrote: > On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 05:33:07PM -0500, Joe Polk wrote: > > While I would agree with what most have been saying, namely that RH can > > do whatever they damn well pleases, I don't necessarily like the trend. > > Caldera has consistently alienated the Linux community starting with > > tactics much like this. I used Caldera back in the day and loved it. But > > they didn't seem interested in the end user, unless you were an end user > > at a big company. I'm not saying this is the direction that RH is > > going, but they have taken some steps down that road. Let's hope they > > can see where at leads WITHOUT having to tread the entire length. > > Again, they can do what they please but that doesn't mean there aren't > > consequences. The consequences here could very well be a disgruntled > > user base that simply goes elsewhere. While they won't hurt the existing > > base of corporate users right now, it will keep people from suggesting > > RH in the future which ultimately will hurt them. > > Wow. Red Hat bumped the version number from the expected 8.1 to 9 and > now you're saying people will stop suggesting Red Hat? A disgruntled > user base that simply goes elsewhere? A little dramatic don't you > think? > > Let's step back and put it all into perspective. Red Hat sent out an > e-mail via chtah.com announcing Red Hat Linux 9, when it would be > generally available, how to get it early, and suddenly everybody's so > annoyed they're jumping distributions? Take a deep breath, pop a valium > and slowly back away from the keyboard. > > -- > Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
