- coming soon to a big-box retailer near you.
Posted on 11/05/2003 6:21:56 PM PST by Leroy S. Mort
Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.
On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million.
For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions--Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux--in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch. Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.
On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million.
For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions--Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux--in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch. "When you go into a CompUSA or Best Buy, the only versions of Linux that you can find on the shelves are Red Hat and SuSE," said Jack Alderson, a Linux and Sun systems administrator for custom-chip maker X-Fab Texas. Alderson fears that Novell will stop creating consumer-oriented versions of SuSE Linux, which he uses at home. "With Red Hat's announcement, that pulled them off of the shelf and out of the general public's view. All there was left was SuSE. Now that's going to disappear also."
The moves could return consumers to a choice of Linux distributions from smaller companies--such as Mandrake, Xandros or Lindows--or from community projects such as Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware.
Novell appears to be planning to carry SuSE's open-source torch, but it hasn't made specific comments regarding lower-priced versions of its Linux products.
"Novell is committed to the open-source community," Chief Executive Jack Messman said Tuesday in a conference call. "With SuSE, we gain access to and will continue to actively support key SuSE-sponsored open-source initiatives."
While SuSE's high-end server products retail for $450 or more, SuSE 9 Professional--which includes publicly available Linux server packages--only costs $80.
Charles Philip Chan, a Toronto resident who has used Linux for about a decade, believes that Novell's acquisition is additional validation for the open-source operating system.
"On one hand it is good, because it looks like Linux is moving in the commercial space," he said, adding that consumers still have a lot of choice among community projects on the Internet. "There are a lot of other distributions out there."
However, Chan said the consumer market will likely expand at a slower rate, because there will be fewer versions on shelves at retail stores. While Red Hat Linux won't be available at retail, the company is supporting a community project, Fedora, to create distributions based on cutting-edge Linux technology.
Arthur Tyde, the founder and former president of the Bay Area Linux Users' Group, is optimistic about SuSE remaining a choice for consumers. SuSE Linux 9 has already been released, and he fully expects to see the next version at retail.
"I think it is wait and see," he said. "It might not affect the community at all. From a consumer standpoint, I think you will still see SuSE Linux in CompUSA."
Moreover, while some have viewed troubled Novell's purchase plans as a potential threat to SuSE, Tyde said that Novell is just getting a second chance and who knows what the company will do with SuSE.
"You have to think about what they are really buying," he said. "They are not buying the rights to all that code. They are buying credibility to that space."
And, Tyde said, for Novell to gain credibility in the Linux community means keeping consumer product on the shelves.
- coming soon to a big-box retailer near you.
Red Hat's chief executive has said that Linux needs to mature further before home users will get a positive experience from the operating system, saying they should choose Windows instead.
Linux is seen by Microsoft as its most dangerous competitor for desktop operating systems, and after a number of high-profile cases where government departments have switched from Windows to Linux-based systems, the OS has been making some progress. However, Red Hat said that the hype around desktop Linux is still mostly unfounded at the moment.
Matthew Szulik, chief executive of Linux vendor Red Hat, said on Monday that although Linux is capable of exceeding expectations for corporate users, home users should stick with Windows: "I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line," he said. "I would argue that from the device-driver standpoint and perhaps some of the other traditional functionality, for that classic consumer purchaser, it is my view that (Linux) technology needs to mature a little bit more."
Szulik gave an example of his 90-year-old father going to a local retailer in order to purchase a computer with Linux: "We know painfully well what happens. He will try to get it installed and either doesn't have a positive experience or puts a lot of pressure on your support systems," he said.
However, Szulik expects Linux to be ready in a couple of years after it has had time to mature. In the mean time, he is adamant that corporate users would be surprised by how much the operating system has to offer. "Consumers want USB drivers and digital camera support; but for the enterprise desktop, that is a little bit different -- that area is ripe," he said. "We think that the enterprise desktop market place is much more strategic and has buyers whose needs we can exceed."
Oooops, it's free!
The Intel hardware platform is an open market, where each Linux vendor has to compete with other operating systems including other Linux distributions, and very few of them have some other source of cash flow to support a full-blown OS development effort.
Just a guess.
Unfortunately for MS, if Longhorn is going to be anything other than Windows 95 with a fresh coat of lipstick, it's going to have to do what Apple did with OSX, and that's dump some legacy support. When they do this, market share is up for grabs, and Apple & Linux and something we don't even think about now may grab some of it.
Actually, you can use virtually any version of the Mac OS, as well as various other flavors of Unix written for the Motorola or PowerPC chip, as the case may be. I confess I'm not sure what, other than the Mac OS, is available for the G3/4/5.
The hardware sales support the OS development effort.
Fine, but I'm not speaking about motivation; I'm speaking about the ability to do it. If it is a motivation thing, what's holding the companies back, since such a system would have the ability to immediately compete with Windows?
When I said the hardware sales support the OS development effort, I meant financially. OS development is not cheap; serious cash flow is needed to furnish the ability to do the work. There are a *lot* of highly motivated people working in Linux now, but most of their companies seem to be rather sparsely financed.
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