Cart before the horse

[Jim Wildman]

The real hook in RHEL is the 3rd party support.  It is still (as far as
I can tell) the only Linux distro that has full enterprise level support
from Oracle, Veritas and Tivoli, not to mention quite a few others.
This is the killer for the large enterprise customer base.  So RH can
leverage that and have 1 sales guy and some CEO/COO/CIO types spend some
time with a customer and sell 1000's of seats.  Or hire hundreds of
people to sell shops with 10 each.  I'm willing to bet they've done the
math and know which side the bread is buttered on.  

And as long as they are making money for the ISV's, what incentive do
the ISV's have to certify on another platform?


On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Paul Heinlein wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Bill Gradwohl wrote:
> 
> > Today we have Novell acquiring SUSE and Bruce Perins is also
> > announcing a rival distro:
> 
> >From the cheap seats where I sit, it seems that Novell still has a
> long way to go -- both in terms of quality of work and sheer market
> persistence -- before current or prospective Red Hat customers will
> jump ship.
> 
> Same thing with Debian: its testing branch has been around for quite a
> while and it still requires near-expert level ability to install it.
> My hunch is that it'll be a while before the Debian folks devise a
> stable distro with current package versions and an installer that
> works for mere mortals.
> 
> > I just believe that its prudent to wait a few months and see what
> > shakes out before wasting a lot of effort, especially when industry
> > behemoths are maneuvering.
> 
> I have a hard time seeing that "a few months" is all it'll take.
> Novell still has a need to make a profit for its shareholders, so it
> can't just throw endless developer hours at the project. Nor will
> Bruce's announcement change life for the vast majority of Debian
> developers.
> 
> Oh, and there's all the effort that current Red Hat admins have
> invested in installation/upgrade infrastructure and configuration
> management.  Press releases from Novell and Debian don't inspire me to
> say, "Gee, what neat press releases! I think I'll ditch my
> infrastructure on the strength of their promises." :-)
> 
> It's not that either Novell or Debian can't achieve their goals. I
> hope they bring to Linux even more excellence. It's just that there
> are, and will continue to be, lots of Red Hat and Fedore legacy
> systems out there in need of long-term support.
> 
> --Paul Heinlein <heinlein at cse.ogi.edu>
> 
> 
> --
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> http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
> 
> 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE                                jim at rossberry.com
http://www.rossberry.com