Red Hat’s dominance is worrisome to some industry players, who say the Raleigh, N.C., company needs effective competition to prevent it from becoming a Microsoft Corp. among Linux vendors and to ensure the operating system continues to develop in an open way.
And who wouldn’t want to have MSFT’s influence over their market? Can you fault RedHat for that?
But the openness of the source itself and the fact there are competing distributions — RedHat vs SuSE is not like Macintosh vs Windows, after all — doesn’t really convince me that RedHat is a monopoly. I hope never to run RedHat again: the pain of dealing with RPM is still fresh in my mind. If I couldn’t get what I needed from FreeBSD’s Linux emulation, I’d go with Debian or SuSE.
2 Comments
Caution: Following comments are from a casual observer who may need some fact-checking!
Why didn’t the UnitedLinux partners go with Redhat’s proposed standard instead of trying to challenge RedHat? Can you say “miscalcualtion?” Sure, RedHat had an obvious head start with their own spec, but you could also say they had blazed the trail and then invited others to follow.
Perhaps history repeats itself once more: I used to read frequently about the emerging standard UNIX platform. That was about 20 years ago. Never really happened, did it?
I don’t know what UnitedLinux was all about (I’ll look into it), but my experience with RedHat has been fine so long as you don’t need to add anything they haven’t packaged, either the application/library or a specific version. Then you may have stepped into a nest of vipers . . . .
It helps to remember that Linux is just the kernel source, not the compiler and other tools, not even stuff like cp(1) or mv(1). So when you choose a distribution, you’re choosing the packaging system and associated philosophy/quality.
On its face, UnitedLinux looks a lot like a consortium of lesser players trying to get some attention at the expense of the dominant player, but that’s perhaps unfair. It remains to be seen if anyone will go with UnitedLinux versus whatever they use now (which means whatever the staff geeks like). Tarring RedHat with the monopoly brush, a la MSFT, may cause some to question if RedHat is too dominant, but at the end of the day, you need to get your work done.