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.
IMHO:
Linux is a committee effort, Apple is proprietary, it can move and decide faster.
Now someone like Novel could "do something similar with Linux on intel" but then it would be a proprietary system as well.
"Free" Linux is going to be slow in arriving with a "standardized" desktop that's suitable for consumer/home non-tech users.
Remember also that Linux is not Unix, so there's still some ground to catch up for it.
I also remember in the 90s when the holy grail was to bring Unix to the desktop with a decent GUI. It broke down in the various standards battles with each vendor trying to get its product to become the standard. (It also didn't help that Microsoft joined competing groups and gummied up the works.)
So, what Apple has done is quite remarkable and gives it a lot of room to grow bringing more and more features of FreeBSD to its product through new interfaces.
It's a remarkable product, IMO, and should logically be the alternative to Windows on the desktop for non-tech users at least until Linux is able to provide the same ease, simplicity, security and functionality to the consumer market.
FWIW.
The RH 8.0 is less likely to get nailed by a Windows virus floating around. It also gives me a UNIX like OS to host stuff like CVS. My python code runs portably between Windows 2000 and Linux, so it is fine either way. The loss of support for RH 8.0 will probably cause me to migrate the box to be a dedicated QNX 6.2.1 development system. I won't miss the goofy Ximian e-mail reader. It is damn irritating when I'm trying to clear the daily spew of SPAM.
I use QNX for real time data acquisition tasks. It runs beautifully on my 100 MHz 486 PC104 CPU. I wrote a device driver that allows sampling of 2 accelerometer channels at 50 KHz each and 16-bits of resolution. You can't even tell it is running. Concurrently with that sampling, I have a PPP process managing an internet link over a Kyocera 200 module (1XRTT), a Garmin GPS monitoring time and position, a TCP server feeding data to the locomotive over an 802.11b wireless LAN, DSP processes crunching the accelerometer data, a serial process talking rs485 to pull data off 7 bearing transmitter units, a PIC processor monitoring wheel speed and other processes. All that going on on a 100 MHz 486 in 32 megabytes of RAM and a solid state 128 MB disk module. Try that with Windows.
The only slow performance that I've witnessed on QNX 6 has been the Arcom VGA board during shutdown. The Arcom driver isn't particularly good at graphics on the PC104 stack. My development box is a PII 350 MHz Pentium with 384 MB RAM and 30 GB of disk. That machine has an ATI graphics board. It is MUCH snappier than my Windows 2000 machine running a similar ATI card on a 1.1 GHz Athlon CPU with 512 MB RAM and a 60 GB ATA100 disk.
There is one other area of slow performance that I need to fix in my current hardware suite under QNX 6.2.1. The boot process is managed by the "diskboot" executable. It appears to be probing for SCSI controllers, but I have only the Apacer solid state disk module (EIDE). The Apacer is ready to go in 1 second, but the SCSI probes for 7 targets with mandatory timeouts of 2 seconds per target causes a big delay in boot up. The "sloginfo" analysis program exposes the source of the delay, but doesn't explain what diskboot is touching. QNX 4.25 booted to fully ready in 20 seconds.
Everyone seems to be overlooking this. From what I've been reading, Fedora is pretty darn good, and the support for it is community based.
Decidedly. Novell is positioning themselves for a serious run on corporate accounts with SUSE as the desktop and applications server environments, Netware (still incredibly stable and efficient) for file and print services, and they gave in to the Webserver standard some time ago (either v5.1 or 6.0, I forget) by incorporating Apache instead of something proprietary - they were playing with WebSphere for awhile in there too. Starting at Netware v5.1 it even looked like Linux when it booted up (greenie-weenies inside brackets, that sort of look).
The longterm goal is to offer corporations an integrated computing environment that does not need a license from Redmond. They now have the makings, but the integration part still has years to go, IMHO. In the meantime the marketing problem is still there. It'll be quite a challenge.
One day I took a step back and realized that most of the open source applications I wanted to use (Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firebird, MySQL, etc.) had Windows ports. So I bought a retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional and installed all the open source applications I wanted to play with.
Now I spend my free time playing with the applications, rather than the operating system. I would agree that Linux is not yet ready for home prime-time.
The folks at QNX decided to change their distribution model when the moved from QNX4.25 to QNX 6. I paid over $10,000 for my initial QNX4 commercial development licenses and deployment licenses were nearly $1,000 per node. The QNX 6 release offers free non-commercial code to encourage developers to use it and become proficient. Commercial developers can buy the Momentics Standard Edition or Profession edition packages to deploy custom kernel images for commercial use. The deployment price is $80 per node. Much more reasonable. If you plan to deploy hundreds of thousands of nodes, they make a very good deal, so it scales commercially.
The home PC user is NOT the target audience for QNX. QNX has been king in the world of real time process control on the factory floor. They share a portion of the embedded systems world with VxWorks. pSOS, Windows CE, Symbian and a few other players.
Frankly, I hope QNX never achieves broad acceptance for home users. That would just invite the litigious idiots in government to attack the company.
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