On Friday 13 May 2005 06:37, Ken Schneider wrote:

On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 16:16 -0400, Michael W Cocke wrote:

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On Thu, 12 May 2005 14:51:11 +0200, you wrote:

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Red Hat has the advantage of being the flavor of choice in America,

Red Hat is the flavor of choice in the business world, maybe not so anymore in the home market, in the US that is.

That little country called Europe just might dominate the market in the future, and I suspect that SuSE will dominate there. And, if my guess is correct, the Asian market just might swing away from American domination because of the image damage done by M$.

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I'd want to see proof of that statement. Red Hat made a LOT of people unhappy when they killed their consumer line. Fedora is too unstable snip > Mike-

-- Ken Schneider Colin

On Thursday 12 May 2005 4:16 pm, Michael W Cocke wrote:

On Thu, 12 May 2005 14:51:11 +0200, you wrote:

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Red Hat has the advantage of being the flavor of choice in America,

I'd want to see proof of that statement. Red Hat made a LOT of people unhappy when they killed their consumer line. Fedora is too unstable to use for anything like production True. One of my pet peeves is upgrading from one release to the next. There are basicly a few different sets of needs: Commercial server - requires highly stable system. These will always be slow to upgrade - regardless of the OS. Usually the managers want to fully test a new release. This is what is addressed by the Enterprise Servers.

Lower end server - The operator of this type of server desires stability but also may want a more simpler way to upgrade. This is addressed (kind of by either the enterprise systems, or the professional systems like SuSE 9.3. Personal desktop or workstation. This is generally addressed by SuSE 9.3 professional, Fedora, Novell Desktop, etc. What I would like is a subscription service where I could continually maintain my system without the need to acquire the next release. Neither YaST nor up2date address this, but Gentoo does. By subscription service, I mean a paid for service similar to YOU, but that would allow me to use that service to migrate piecemeal to the next release. Here is a specific dilemma we at the BLU have. We have server still running Red Hat 7.1. To upgrade it requires that we both must travel to the data center and sit there for a few hours to upgrade and test the system. Both of us have day jobs and live and work quite a distance from the data center. I think this type of service would be profitable. It would not compete with the high end Enterprise systems. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On 5/13/05, jonlists wrote:

In the same boat here...... we had customers who had support contracts with Redhat until they were abandoned, and now we are steadily moving all of those customers to Suse, typically SLES.

I don't understand the statement that RedHat is still the flavor of choice in the U.S. That may have been the case in the past, but I don't think it's true anymore.

Jon Johnston Creative Business Solutions IBM, Microsoft, Novell/Suse, Sophos Consultants http://www.cbsol.com blog:http://bingo.cbsol.com

I also see SuSE with my customers. BUT, I'm a "Red Hat Certified Engineer" because I was offered a free week of "boot camp" if I passed the RHCT/RHCE test a year ago. I don't know if RH ended up giving the class away, or if the distributor we use paid, but my company did not have to. I think the class was $1500 or $2000 so getting it free was a big incentive. Thus my resume says "Red Hat Certified Engineer", even though I use SuSE on a far more frequent basis. SuSE/Novell really need to look at how RH is doing training/certification in the USA and step up to the plate with similar offerings. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century

On 5/13/05, C. Richard Matson wrote:

On Friday May 13 2005 8:12 am, jonlists wrote:

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In the same boat here...... we had customers who had support contracts with Redhat until they were abandoned, and now we are steadily moving all of those customers to Suse, typically SLES.

I don't understand the statement that RedHat is still the flavor of choice in the U.S. That may have been the case in the past, but I don't think it's true anymore.

Here the Red Hat fans have mostly gone to Debian. There was some interest in SUSE until one of our "hotshots" flubbed a net install of SUSE at a LUG meeting. They refuse to buy the distros. Or even show someone how to install from the CD's. Our attendance at the meetings is steadily dropping and there is a tremendous amount of resistance to change. If it isn't old traditional Unix - it isn't accepted. Rich

I suppose that is one of the reasons that the U.S. is falling behind in the tech sector. " We must not change, we fear change. " This type of attitude makes me ill. If one doesn't adapt and change.. then stagnation and death do occur. It's sad really. And with the planet pretty much being flat these days.. the worker from China or India doesn't have to come to the U.S. to make use of his/her knowledge.. so them being cheaper and having more of "yes" attitude will cause the U.S. SO many issues. Bangalore is next door to Baltimore now because of the wired world. Amazing. I just don't understand ununwillingness to give something new a try. Someone may have been a "hotshot" at one time.. but if I had a dime for every install that had an issue... I'd be so rich that I could just kick back and live anywhere without a care. -Ben -- "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend religious faith."

On 5/13/05, Colin Carter wrote:

On Saturday 14 May 2005 02:47, C. Richard Matson wrote:

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On Friday May 13 2005 8:12 am, jonlists wrote: snip and there is a tremendous amount of resistance to change. If it isn't old traditional Unix - it isn't accepted. Rich Only 'boffins' would do this; which means a small group cf the hoi polloi.

You mean they are the only ones who change or are the only one who are resistant to change? -Ben -- "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend religious faith."

its2am@gmail.com wrote:

A couple of people mentioned the statement of mine that Red Hat is the flavor of choice in the US, and asking for corroborative evidence, e.g.:

...

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I don't understand the statement that RedHat is still the flavor of choice in the U.S. That may have been the case in the past, but I don't think it's true anymore.

My opinion is based solely on evidence in the news recently, and here are some examples:

*** http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/23/red_hat_results_q3_05/

"Red Hat yesterday said its sales rose 55 per cent during its third quarter of fiscal 2005, reaching $50.9m from the year-ago total, $32.8m. Q3's sales were ten per cent higher than Q2's." ***

*** http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1382&tag=nl.e539

"...goes on to discuss why [IBM's Solaris-to-Linux migration assessment program] involves Red Hat Linux and not Novell's SuSE Linux...." ***

*** http://www.nwfusion.com/nlnovell1239

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From Dave Kearn's (a well-known Novell fan) Newsletter, March 2005:

"...then I heard that the company needed to restate its earnings. It seems that $6 million revenue reported as new license sales actually came from maintenance agreements.

This doesn't change the bottom line, and everything I said about the earnings last week is still valid, but as Novell watcher Bill Snyder said on TheStreet.com: "...the money simply moves from one bucket to another, but because license revenue is a key indicator of new business, while maintenance revenue reflects ongoing payment from current clients, the shift is disturbing...." ***

My overall impression has been for the last while (Dell, the number one PC maker, pumping money into Red Hat, IBM, the 2nd-largest software company, supporting Red Hat and not SuSE, Red Hat doing well financially while SuSE/Novell struggles.

We just bought and very nice system from IBM at work and it comes with SuSE not RH. (over $80K) Dee

Perhaps it's not an accurate opinion; but may I ask for supporting evidence to help change my mind?

*** Original Post:

It seems to me there are a couple of points here:

1) Is the Inquirer a reliable news rag? Who knows, but the story was also in eWeek, which, I think, has a better rep:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1814335,00.asp

So, is the story factual? Yes.

2) Are the Novell "Linux leaders" leaving? Well, the following paragraph is taken from the eWeek article:

"...after the departures of vice chairman Chris Stone last November and of chief technology officer Alan Nugent this March, both of whom were pivotal players in the company's decision to embrace Linux and open source across all of its products and services...."

It would appear that some good brains have left Novell recently. What the article doesn't answer is, "Why?"

3) What effect will this have on SuSE and Novell? Well, I've heard SuSE described as Novell's "dying gasp", but that, obviously, is one person's opinion. We'll see.

4) Is SuSE getting better? That, as has been seen on this list, is debatable.

My personal opinion is that Linux (in general) has improved drastically over the past 5 years, but is still only about as usable as Windows 98 was. SuSE is a pretty good flavor. So's Red Hat.

Red Hat has the advantage of being the flavor of choice in America, which is a pretty big, unified market. There was also news yesterday of Michael Dell's investment of $95.5 million into Red Hat. The European market is fragmented, to say the least.

What does all this mean? Well, I'm sure some intelligent folk on this list will chime in, but my opinion is that SuSE will maintain its small sliver of a market share, and some new brains will be found to replace those who've left Novell, and the world will continue to turn.

On 5/19/05, its2am@gmail.com wrote:

My overall impression has been for the last while (Dell, the number one PC maker, pumping money into Red Hat, IBM, the 2nd-largest software company, supporting Red Hat and not SuSE, Red Hat doing well financially while SuSE/Novell struggles.

Perhaps it's not an accurate opinion; but may I ask for supporting evidence to help change my mind?

I'm not an IBM expert, but I think IBM first made a big investment in SUSE technology a couple years ago, then followed that up with a $20M purchase of Novell stock last year. That investment was in the same press releases as the SuSE purchase by Novell, and as I recall the 20M was contingent on the SuSE purchase. In a way, you could say that IBM gave Novell $20M to buy SuSE and make it a world class solution for IBM's customer. Also, if I remember right, a couple years ago SLES 8 was the first Linux release of any distro to run on IBM mainframes. IBM then made a concerted effort to sell their big iron as a highly scalable Linux environment. The concept was if a big company needed a couple hundred Linux boxes, they could buy one of IBM's big iron machines and run all the Linux instances on it. Then if a single webserver/fileserver/whatever needed more horsepower, they could just adjust the environment to give it a bigger and bigger VM (virtual machine). The IBM work with Redhat that I have read about over the last year has been an attempt to get Redhat to catch up to SuSE. After all IBM would like to give its customers a choice of Distros for the big iron.. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century

On 5/19/05, Greg Freemyer wrote:

The IBM work with Redhat that I have read about over the last year has been an attempt to get Redhat to catch up to SuSE. After all IBM would like to give its customers a choice of Distros for the big iron..

Also recall that Sun recently announced that RedHat = Linux (makes you wonder just where they hold their marketing meetings), and IBM have been looking for a way to get some payback against Sun for a while now. Also 2am's 'analysis' ignores that RHAS2 is coming to end of life at the end of the year, ES3 is creaky and their support contracts, unlike suse's, do not include a free upgrade path to the latest versions so of course their sales are up. He also fails to understand that the Linux marketplace is Service based as opposed to Sales, not to mention the rather extensive disparity in the pricing models of Suse vs RedHat (Certainly sir, here's your copy of ES4 for $$$$$, oh you need JBoss on that, that would be the AS pack for $$$$, and you'll want to keep it up to date for $$$, and your running Oracle on it as well, well you really need our special FS for $$$$$$...). RedHat's real key is their RHCE program, the software may be so so but the training is excellent, unfortunately most of those being put through the mill (that I've seen) tend to come from a Windows background as opposed to a Unix and are less inclined to go playing with other distros. Once Novel's or LPI's training program's have caught up (and Novel switch away from netware migrators) hopefully this will change. Regards, Ben

On 5/20/05, Hans Witvliet wrote:

Just reviewing a tender and a presentation from IBM. We asked for open source in general, and they are only offering SuSE. When asking, they were not even contemplating offering anything else BUT SuSE! ;-)

I've just gotten back from a meeting with a Sun Rep, lots and lots on how DeadRat, Windows and HP-UX were missing various features WRT Solaris 10 (naturally missing out on how Solaris was lacking certain promised features). I had great fun pointing out how SuSE had millitary grade security, file system innovation with Reiser4 and container like systems with Xen :-) I do belive that IBM will offer RedHat should a customer ask for it however, but I'm sure IBM would offer Debian Slink if a customer asked for it and their was a 5 year support contract in their for them :)