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.:
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
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.