[OS:N:] Growing Pies (was: Quick Survey)

[Evan Leibovitch <evan telly org>]

On 30 Sep 2002, Jeremy Hogan wrote:

> So ignore the survey and move on.

Indeed. As someone who has, er, commented on RH tactics before, I don't
see the problem here.

Don't want to take the survey? Don't take it. It was clearly marked as Red
Hat marketing, so there was no pretense of anything else. Personally, I
was going to ignore the issue until I saw the initiative getting bashed.

There's no obligation for everything on this list to be of interest to
every subscriber. A couple of well-marked things like this are preferable
to making the list only suitable for the lowest common denominator.

In keeping with the community spirit under which this is being done, I
would ask that the results of the survey were published on this list. If
that was agreed to, heck, even I would take it. Given that it was marked
clearly as Red Hat marketing, there's no obligation at all RH to come back
here with the findings ... but it would be nice.

> divorcing Red Hat from OpenSource is a mistake, not b/c I work here,
> but b/c it is the leading company in the proof that OSS can be even
> moderately successful.

As far as advocacy goes, one could make the case that even if none of the
Linux distributions are financially successful, the 'after-market' and
periphery most certainly is. Just ask IBM, New Horizons or O'Reilly.

I don't know of anyone who would call Debian an 'unsuccessful'
distribution, they just use different yardsticks than revenue. And there
are plenty of end-users integrators, trainers and hardware vendors making
or saving money because, in part, of Debian.

> I would ask you this, when a discussion happens around OSS, how do you
> expect to remain generic?

It's a legitimate question, but it has an answer. It is IMO important that
RH, as well as any other Linux vendor, *do* make an effort in some of its
marketing to be generic.

Vendors not being generic enough is what killed Unix in the long term.
Nobody was advancing Unix, it was Solaris or AIX or HP/UX or Iris etc.
Everyone had their own hardware, their own gratuitous "enhancements",
their own standards and certifications -- the only company to actually
have the guts to use the word "Unix" in a significant implementation was
SCO. And all that Unix fragmentation played right into Microsoft's hands.

Right now in Linux's maturity it's as important -- maybe more -- to work
more to increase the size of the pie, than to go aggressively for the
biggest piece possible of a pie that isn't as big as it ought to be.

Red Hat folk often talk about not wanting to be the leader in a field of
one, but in order to make that statement more than window dressing there's
a limit on how badly RH (or any other distribution) should distance itself
from 'the pack'. By all means, demonstrate superiority in various aspects
of RH, but don't take it so far that "Red Hat Linux" is seen as distinct
from "Linux" in any substantial way. Conversely, making "Red Hat"
synonymous with "Linux" (in a manner that makes other implementations
appear as phonies) is also an extremely poor long-term strategy IMO.

> Should all discussions end in "you should find an OSS e-mail client?"
> or should someone say "I've used Evolution and Kmail to great
> success"?

It's a two step process.

The first step is getting folks to understand the overall benefit of OSS.
The stability (in multiple contexts), the scalability, the TCO, the
security. And, indeed -- though this is something that goes against RH's
short-term interests -- the lack of vendor lock-in.

The leap from the Unix/Windows worlds to Linux is still difficult; our
biggest obstacle, as I have said before, is as much inertia as
proprietary vendors. But IMO the advocacy/sales job to combat this is
*separate* from the answer to "OK, you're ready to try OSS, which
implementation is best for you?" Here RH can put its best foot forward, as
can UnitedLinux and Mandrake and Red Flag and Debian etc ... even the BSD
vendors.

It's the blurring of these two steps that IMO presents a risk of Linux
going the way of Unix. We need to show the diversity as a strength, not an
impediment that anyone can neatly sidestep by taking the Red Hat Way (or
anyone else's One True Way).

It's for this reason that the LSB needs more respect. It's for this reason
that I keep encouraging RH to see LPI as a complement, not a competitor,
to RHCE. And it's why I complained about the SF march as *looking* too
much like a "pro-RH" event than a "pro-Linux" event.

Anyway, you get the point. It's one thing to want to make money from
Linux, quite another to try to gouge it the way Sun and HP and IBM did to
Unix. I am *not* saying that Red Hat is doing that now, but I occasionally
see signs that it is capable of it. There needs to be some long-term
thinking here, else we risk tipping that delicate balance from healthy
diversity to suicidal splintering.

As a leader in this field, RH has an important role to play in the success
of open source software becoming accepted in the IT mainstream. I just
want to help ensure that, along the way, we truly learn from the mistakes
of the Unix era, not repeat them.

I would ask Charles to stick around. It's not as bad as it looks, and if
we work at it we can keep it in the right direction :-).


-- 

Evan Leibovitch, Brampton, Canada <evan at telly dot org>
Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well.