On 5/19/05, its2am@gmail.com <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