[RULE] Re: Fedora replaces Red Hat Linux -- "unreliable" Red Hat???(rant warning)

[Martin Stricker]

"Bryan J. Smith" wrote:
> 
> Quoting Martin Stricker <shugal at gmx.de>:
> > Red Hat has become very unreliable since 7.3 (not the OS but
> > the company politics).
> 
> Please explain this statement.  In what way has Red Hat's "company
> politics" become "unreliable"?

In the past years, new releases came out "when they are ready", and a
new release didn't limit the lifetime of older releases that much. I
could set up a server with a rather new (but sufficiently tested)
release and run it for two years or more. Then when I needed to upgrade,
it nearly was time for new hardware anyway (due to German tax laws all
hardware should be in use at least three years). Now I have to upgrade
at least once in between - with all the validating I need to do that
becomes quite expensive.

Then all the different changes happened - the powertools vanished,
contrib.redhat.com vanished, support for alternative platforms (SPARC,
Alpha) vanished, support for other platforms like ia64 and mainframe
appears only sporadic, the Enterprise versions appeared (which are a
good thing IMHO), Red Hat moved farther away from the Linux community,
and now suddenly they revert back? One announcement in this direction,
the next in another and so forth... For me this looks like the Red Hat
management tries to find the best way to approach business, but doesn't
know which direction to go. This doesn't feel right. I might be wrong,
but I don't like the way things are developing... Maybe the merge with
Fedora bring them back to a straight course again...

> From a developer standpoint, they continue to be one of the
> _very_few_ Linux distributors that are 100% GPL-anal, with a 100%
> redistributable version.

Right, which is one of the main reasons I chose Red Hat in the first
place. I really hope it will stay that way!

> As far as their "business tactics," those remained _unchanged_ since
> their founding.  Bob Young will run Red Hat like the Microsoft of
> the Linux world, and there is _nothing_ wrong with that because the
> former offers a "balance" (whereas Microsoft does not offer such).

Interesting - I always considered S.u.S.E. as being the Microsoft of the
Linux world...

> That's just cut-through, but smart business, combined with a 100%
> consumer- focused product.

Oh is it? Which customer will like these short support times? Yeah, I
know I can go and buy the Enterprise edition. As a company I would, but
as a home PC user? I understand that Red Hat's focus is business, but
losing the regular home user is a very bad move IMHO - many businesses
went with Windows only because many employees and managers already knew
it from their home PC.

> > My bosses definitely don't like this and are considering another
> > Linux distro. :-((
> 
> Why?  Because Red Hat will no longer offer to support its
> redistributable version for 3+ years?  No matter how profitable their
> Cygnus division is, do so could cannot sustain that level of "loss"
> when it comes to unpaid support.

Not exactly. They are worried about the "sudden" change and big price
increase. Even though I've seen this comming, they didn't - all they see
is that all of a sudden they need to use the expensive Entrprise product
with the additional support contracts to get acceptable - especially
when they see that all they need is in the base product, it's just
missing the support time. The main point here is bad communication. It
looks like the PR guys didn't communicate the upcomming changes soon and
thoroughly enough - especially why it will be good for the customers to
pay so much more for basically the same thing...

> You have to ask yourself, who really needs a distro supported that
> long?  The ones who write and/or use binary-only applications!
> That's who!  It only costs you _if_ you need that either as a
> developer or commercial user.

I don't agree. Does the average home user want to reinstall every year?
I don't think so. Yeah, he's not the target, that that's a bad mistake!
I'm currently under pressure by users and local management to use
S.u.S.E. instead of Red Hat, because they know S.u.S.E. from their home
PC (I'm in Germany). Since I work for a worldwise US company it's
unlikely that we'll switch to S.u.S.E., but what I want to say is it's
important to be present on home PCs as well! The average user buys a PC,
installs OS and software and then uses it for years. Some security
patches, updates for his favourite software, and that's it. Reinstall
the OS every year? He'd rather choose another OS with less hassle. I
know you can't make much money with home users, but they are important.

> It makes no sense for Red Hat to maintain the support infrastructure
> at their _own_expense_ to support binary compatibility.  So they took
> the only road they could.  And now we have a platform with a 5-7 year
> binary compatibility lifetime that you can pay for.  Furthermore,
> _contrary_ to the media out there, the _all_ 5-7 year "enterprise"
> version release _are_ still based on the 12 month "consumer"
> versions.

Well... if they do support binary compatibility anyway... ;-)))
I don't say Red Hat shouldn't try to make money with support, on the
contrary. What I'm trying to say is that for many people who didn't
follow the announcements too closely this change comes surprisingly and
suddenly, and that it's a huge price step. With dropping IT budgets,
this is more than enough for many IT managers to look for a different
solution without unpleasant surprises. No experiments, no surprises, no
problems. That isn't always true, but it's what upper management
*thinks* is true, and in the end only that counts.

> It's all about what you are willing to pay for.

Yes, but a good salesman can influence what I'm willing to pay for, and
from my point of view Red Hat has made several bad mistakes there. To
get upper management to swallow increasing costs I must be able to
justify them, but I don't know how. Recent changes and how they were
communicated didn't help me, on the contrary! I can only hope that Red
Hat *soon* will once again follow a *visible* straight direction, or I
will lose the fight. As will Red Hat.

I hope I'm just pessimistic - this last announcement just was too much
for me to stay silent...

Sorry for the long post and the off-topic!

Best regards,
Martin
-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/
Red Hat Linux 8.0 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/


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