Re: [S.u.S.E. Linux] Re: No Linux on Merced
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On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Donnie Barnes wrote:
The Red Hat folks came out to Internet World in Los Angeles and visited assorted Linux Users Groups. They said support for non-Intel platforms is as much as dead. Not enough of a market to make it worth the development expense. I
I was the one who spoke at that users group. I did *not* say that. I did say that there weren't any really interesting things left to port *to*
What about the 286? At least it would be, um, well... interesting ;-).
(basically that right now we had no plans to do official PPC or m68k ports). I never said we'd be dropping Alpha or SPARC support.
Since when did it become Red Hat's job to produce different ports? Do Debian or Caldera or Slackware feel the need to do that? It seems hard enough these days worrying about *one* architecture to support. There is no question these days that future of the Alpha chip is uncertain. It's possible that Compaq could pump money and marketing into it like Digital never did -- and just as possible that it could dump Alpha. You can't believe the statements from the suits these days, everything is up for grabs. The problem with uncertainty is that it keeps people away -- not many will take a chance on an architecture that might be orphaned within a year. Red Hat took a gamble by putting resources into commercial Alpha and SPARC distros, without any commercial app support (can you even buy ApplixWare for Alpha or SPARC Linux?) and far less independent hardware support than the Intel platform. It's unfair to expect Red Hat alone to solve all these problems. But I can't see enough of a market to convince Caldera or Slackware to go there too.
We have no plans to do that. If we did I'd be feeling really bad about that $1500 I just spent so that one of the glibc developers could have his own SPARC to play with.
There's nothing wrong with commercial distributors from funding R&D for the community -- it's a nice way to give back. It may be too much, though, to lean on Red Hat to make a Linux port to a different architecture viable without a wide community behind it.
Well I dont use redhat anyway, and my need for a Alpha version makes my opinion more strong due to their latest statements. I was going to use redhat linux on a alpha based system, however they are starting to tread very thin ice with me...their commercial interests outweigh their versatility, its time to can redhat and find a more flexible distributor.
Please don't go making decisions like that based on third hand information, at least. Contact us directly if you have questions of this nature.
Some people will use any excuse if they're looking for a reason to bash. Heck knows, I've succumbed to that myself, maybe ;-). In any case, if/when this person 'cans' Red Hat and looks for another commercial distributor of Alpha Linux, the pickings will be slim indeed. What are his choices?
With the sucky operational ability of redhat, suse and slackware tend to get my vote depending on the task at hand...I know they dont do alpha either but at least they have not taken a stand against the possibility of it
How can you make a claim like this?
It's almost impossible to deal rationally with folks who use deliberately ambiguous (and thus unchallengable) complaints such as "sucky operational ability". Just take heart in the fact that he's not convincing anyone alse with this kind of "reasoning".
We currently have the *only* Alpha distribution. We had the first Alpha distribution. We have the only official SPARC distribution. We had the *first* SPARC distribution. How in the world could you possibly brand us like that based on third hand information?
Personally, I don't even know if there's enough of a market to keep *one* commercial distro viable for these other CPUs. One thing that I've come to believe is that most Linux vendors are not making money hand over fist, and may never really be able to. At $50-60 per shot, even at high volume there's a lot of overhead. Developers, even those working cheap because they love it, still need to eat. And given all the projects/contributions that distros such as Red Hat and Caldera have funded, I can't believe there's a lot of cash left if/when it's time to declare a dividend. It's likely that the VARs, consultants, apps vendors and administrators will make far more money from Caldera and Red Hat products than Caldera and Red Hat ever will... The 'commercial is bad' attitude is not going to go away. It's a symptom of working with freeware, that there will be those who believe that everything should be free. That may be remnants of the FSF/Debian philosophical bent, or it may be just greed; it's best just to leave it alone. If someone's that mad at commercial folk for doing what many of us think is necessary, just let 'em go.
Some folks like to brand us as "too commercial" or what have you. The simple fact is that our products are driven by the developers. We don't have folks in marketing telling us what we can and can't do.
Well, that can't be totally accurate either. At a certain point, someone with budgetary control decides what will and what won't get funded internally. Can you really say that no such decisions get made based on whether Red Hat can (at least) recoup what it spends on a project? If Red Hat funds too many projects that cost more than they earn, there won't be a Red Hat. Maybe it's not the marketers, may be it's the developers who are making decisions on what will be popular (as opposed to just what's most fun or challenging to do).
They have input, but it's the *hackers* in this company that build things like the SPARC distribution. We never decided to do it because we thought it would make us tons of money. Boy would *that* have been stupid. Same goes for the Alpha...
It's one thing for a project not to make tons of money; but you at least want to have the thing earn back its development/maintenance/support costs. As someone in another forum has said, there's only so long you can sell dollar bills for 75 cents.... Being at least a tad concerned about being able to survive as a business (let alone grow), is no sin. - Evan -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e
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evan@telly.org