Red Hat’s Matthew Szulik responds to the questions posed by Slashdot readers in an interesting Q&A.
Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds to Slashdot Readers
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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While abandoning existing Red Hat linux users by about 2004-2005 or so, Szulik makes the case for why his company is still in business. Red Hat is one of the most important contributors to the open source community. With partners and part-owners such as IBM, Oracle and Intel they will be here for some time to come. They stand for surviving in this world gone mad. How they took the open source business model and succeeded will be an interesting focal point for business analysts many years from now.
Great interview. The questions do show the level of frustration RedHat is creating for its fans and long term customers. Would it read the handwriting on the wal?? Whether their decisions are wise is something we will all have to see in the long run, but I personally think RedHat is making a major blunder by screwing those who get its products into the door. It isn’t for nothing that microsoft sometimes tolerates, even encourages, piracy of windows.
For Redhat to say: “here’s fedora, you guys do all the work there, and when you are finished cooking, we will jump in, appropriate your sweat, and rebrand it as “redhat” just plain sucks. People think this makes economic sense, but I think that what they loose in free downloads is precisely what they have gained in brand-name recognition, fan goodwill, and the attendant market share.
If they really plan to put as much effort into Fedora as they did in consumer desktop, the name change is silly and not even to their interest. If they are aiming to just do more leeching on the back of developers that ain’t gonna work.
what does RHE WS cost for a single workstation??? 179 American Dollars???
well i am not about to pay almost 200 bucks for a Linux distro, so i will try Fedora, or Mandrake, or SuSE, (Slackware or Debian maybe) i wont bash Redhat for what they did, they can run their business however they see fit, i think creating the Fedora Project is a sign of good faith and generosity to the Linux community…
there are those that run business that were depending on many servers and workstations running Redhat that are quite peeved about this move, all i can say is switch to another distro only when it becomes necessary, from what i hear is Fedora Legacy Project will keep Redhat-9 packages updated longer than the April 2004 deadline, so there should not be too big of a hurry, i would reccomend building an extra server and workstation for testing packages, and other distros since you feel Redhat left you out in the cold…
@CheapSkate
Because support costs money. Ever heard the saying Freedom isn’t Free? Will Free Software ain’t free either!
RedHat writes a good chunk of the patches and almost all of the graphical administrative tools that come with their distribution.
Documentation, guaranteed suppport, backported security fixes even though a program may have evolved a lot in a few years and several other things all cost a good chunk of cash.
You have Fedora, it’s free.
Want a version of RedHat linux that’s based off the enterprise workstation version but costs less than half as much?
You can always buy the new Retail RedHat product:
RedHat Professional Workstation, retailing for around $85
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=20359120&loc=105&sp=1
Gives you one year of updates and installation support, and it’s really just RHEL WS in disguise…
Just move to SUSE. I just converted all my Red Hat boxes to Gentoo. Never again will I advocate Red Hat to anyone. I’m singing SUSE’ tunes now. And I thought forced upgrades were relegated to other platforms like Windows and Mac. Boy was I wrong. Bye bye Red Hat, I never really like you to begin with, I just regret advocating you to those who were interested in Linux.
I have seen people threaten to go to SuSE because RedHat changed their product line. I have seen people threaten to go to Debian because Novell is buying SuSE. As these Linux vendors continue to try to find ways to make money to stay afloat will people continue to leave? Where will you go if the superior distros are not free?
At least he didn’t promote Microsoft this time. I do think that these businesses that base their product line on Linux do have to differentiate themselves with closed specialization of existing and new software, and with their service to a subset, that they choose to market. In a way RH has an opportunity to learn about its customers with their recent move. They should not hesitate to find a new solution and build for the future.
One distro that always has caught my eye is IcePack Linux. Unfortunately their download mirrors are dead slow, so I’ve never been able to get a successful download. I’ll be considering version 3.0 when it gets released, though.
As far as RedHat goes, I’ve never worried how much something costs as long as the performance of the product make it worth the price. I have yet to see any software product; OS, Office Suite, or program worth more than $100.
Why don’t they mention that product on their web site?
I think most people get Windows XP Home for $50 when they buy a new PC or through the business channel. Pro is about $100. Redhat needs to match that.
Red Hat isn’t screwing anyone unless they are violating the terms of a contract with a customer. In that case, get a lawyer. Otherwise, they owe nothing to no one.
Red Hat does have the option to do business in any way they want to. However, when Mr. Szulik states
“ For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user’s experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.
Xandros will be out in 2 1/2 weeks. Let’s see what you have to say then. The heir apparent is has arrived.
@Andrew G:
“I think most people get Windows XP Home for $50 when they buy a new PC or through the business channel. Pro is about $100. Redhat needs to match that.”
But those are OEM only versions with no support technically. You can’t buy those off the shelf, you can technically only buy those with a new system according to Microsoft. Any other sale is technically violating the M$ reseller agreement. As for OEM, RedHat is working on OEM deals right now, IBM is the first one of them.
You can find more info about the workstation edition here:
http://www.redhat.com/software/workstation/
@Andrew G:
I should also note that it’s a bit hard to find the professional workstation version on their site, you click on software, scroll to the bottom, click ‘other products’ and it’s th first item on the list. I think it’s fairly obvious why they don’t want to tout a relatively cheap version of their enterprise workstation
But, hey I work for a business to, so I understand their motives…
personal OS choice? – by BigGerman
Which OS and desktop environments you, your colleagues and friends use every day? thanks in advance for your honest and direct answer.
Szulik:
I have not used proprietary software for many years. I run a 5 node Linux cluster at home. I use Gnome.
If OSNEWS ever has the opportunity to interview Szulik, please ask him for what purpose would he use a 5 node linux cluster.
It seems excessive, what would you the OSNEWS readers do with that?
Linus only said he uses a 4 CPU system!
“At least he didn’t promote Microsoft this time.”
Yeah, that’s kind of curious since he, himself, uses Linux. Still don’t understand why he ever said that about Windows…
Ok, first, lets get this straight. Szulik did not promote microsoft. He said (and it’s quite truthful) that Linux is not ready for the average home user’s desktop. It’s true. Deal with it. I haven’t used Windows since 1997 and even I’m willing to admit that. If I buy a brand new iPod, will it work with my Linux desktop? Honestly, I’m not sure. If I buy a digital video camera, will it work with Linux? Again, not sure. Until that changes, the average computer user won’t be happy with Linux. Unfortunately, it’s up to hardware manufacturers to fix that problem, there is little the linux community can really do to help.
As for people leaving Red Hat for SuSE, I think this exemplifies why Red Hat left the cheap distro business. There are a *lot* of “Linux users” who are looking for free as in beer software. Free as in beer software doesn’t help Red Hat. It really doesn’t even help the open source community. Red Hat churns out a lot of open source software (more then just about all of the other linux distro shops) which should be more then enough for the linux community (and, by and large, it is). Unfortunately, there is a lot of whiners who want free software, free updates and free support and will continue to march from distro to distro as each one cuts those things out. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision inside of Red Hat, but I’m also sure that if I needed to decide between making very vocal freeloaders happy or making sure that I continue to write open source software and keep my customers happy, I’ll choose the later every time.
..they leave RedHat because RedHat is more expensive than SuSE and it has pood on RH 9 and previous users by withdrawing support quicker than I can say “morons”.
And yes, the guy did promote Microsoft, there’s really no way you can talk your way around that fact. He said the people hsould use Windows for their desktops.
Luckily, there’s Sun as the last real fortress of Linux on the desktop. How ironic, after all the shit that has been piled on Sun by the RedHat community.
Sorry to go offtopic here, but i see some people complaining about RH and telling Suse is the best now. Well let me explain this. If you don’t like RH because they screwing up a free version (your words) why you start using Suse? It’s not free (only i386 for free), all there yast stuff is propary stuff. What does Suse did back to the community?
Redhat always gave stuff back to the community, and people like cox did a great work for the whole linux comm. I dare to say that without Redhat, linux wasn’t so well known to public, and our linux feature was not so bright.
I believe anyone should have the choice for choicing the right os which fits its needs. But simply bashing Redhat without good arguments is inmature.
Anyways I have converted some webservers to Fedora with 2.6 kernel, and we are very happy with it, especially we like yum!
–logging out–
He also said they are trying to make Fedora better for the desktop.
Now, place any person without a clue what a kernel is on a linux distro with the task of getting the printer to work.
They’d agree this sucks. With windows they can atleast follow the manual bundled with the printer, or more common, plug it in and follow the instructions.
Ready for many on the desktop, but not everyone.
I wouldn’t get all warm and fuzzy about Sun, as soon as they can figure out how to get people to put Solaris on the desktop instead of Linux they will drop Linux. When they get the new Java desktop up and running on Solaris, I see them doing something like offering it for sale as an outright buy and not a subscription thus making Solaris more appealing.
Of course that is just my opinion.
No different than Slashdot.
Redhat articles are no longer about redhat, they are about promoting “enter fav distro here”.
Don’t use redhat use “THIS” its better!
Linux is ready for the desktop! (ppl have said this since KDE and Gnome were garbage and only 2 out of 40 soundcards would be auto detected).
I don’t care anymore I want just one distro, I don’t care if its the worse thing ever invented atleast it will shut up the zealots who bash crap they haven’t even tried in 5 years. or bash a point that was answered in the freakin article they’re REPLYING TO.
I’m not sure if its amazing, sad, funny or just plain sick but I sure am sick of it.
I bought the boxed distribution 3 times. I don’t know which distribution I will use next. It looks like Redhat has forgotten that even some of us small guys brought them to the dance.
I have recommended rh to others since 99. I have bought three boxed sets. Im just a home user but it looks like I can’t recommend rh for home users in the future.
You bought thier software 3 times since ’99 and you think you are the one who ‘brought them to the dance’ News flash man RH was WELL established in ’99 and paying them $120 in 4 years hardly means they owe you.
$120 is something and I have talked them up for years. What have you done or what do you care about?
Sorry but the ~$200 you spent probably didn’t even pay for 1 hour worth of Alan Cox’s salary. So what did they do? They released fedora specifically for people like you. They do want you to use their distro, it just makes no sense for them to sell a commercial distro at a such a low price point.
well sure its something but according to you, you payed for 3 years of support for 4 years of use, but they owe YOU hehe
funny.
I will not upgrade until 2.6 is distributed. I will wait and see what is available. Somebody will probably sell be a nice boxed set for $40 or maybe even less. But, I won’t be talking up rh.
What have you done or what do you care about?
I haven’t done anything just like you, thats why I’m gratefull.
Sure I’ve bought a few boxes, supplied lots of time helping users with problems. But I find that a decent trade unlike you. I used redhat daily for some 5 years. That seems more then fair to me. I’m not buying RHEL work station not because I can’t afford $85 but because a 5 year release cycle is useless to me, id just update to the next release every 6 months like I always do anyway, so I’m running Fedora now. Its what alot of us users asked for and we got it.
We have Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake to mention but a few. And for those who really believe in freedom, we have Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, to mention but a few again. If Red Hat died tomorrow I couldn’t give a hoot. Then you expect me to support a distro that advertises Windows for the desktop.
Ummm..hmmm…not likely! So I wasted money supporting them all these years.
Mr Szulik, how about Fedora, is it ready for the desktop or should I still buy Windows? And I was this close to installing Fedora, but he had to say that. I wish Red Hat the best of Luck. I look forward to what Novell-SUSE and SUN have to offer the desktop linux. Ah, the irony. When one window closes, and door opens. You gotta love Linux.
Is it worth grabbing Red Hat 9.0 while it’s still available, or is it just better to go with Fedora? Never got around to trying RH, Suse and Knoppix have been just fine for me.
‘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.” ‘
I guess there’s different ways to interpret this.
My friend asked me the same question yesterday after slackware pissed him off. I told him RH 9 was better cause the reason he left slack was things just “didn’t work” (they did he just can’t handle compiling problems) If you think you’re tech savy id suggest Fedora instead of RH 9. Alot of ppl are saying its the best linux distro to date. Give it a try and see if they’re wrong. I agree with them as far as features but its no mission critical system thats for sure.
So again if you want a toy to see some cool stuff, fedora. If you want to just install a machine and not tinker.. RH9 in my opnion.
“We hope that consumer-focused technologies will thrive and mature in the Fedora Project setting. When the code is production quality, Red Hat will make them available as part of a supported distribution.”
See? That’s exactly what I always thought and said. Red Hat is not at all giving up on the home desktop, they are just working on it!
Some people seem to believe that Fedora was “abandoned” by Red Hat, just letting the community work on it instead. This is obviously completely untrue, just like OpenOffice.org isn’t “abandoned” by SUN or Mozilla wasn’t “abandoned” by Netscape (until they went down).
Also from Linuxbaby:
“If they really plan to put as much effort into Fedora as they did in consumer desktop, the name change is silly and not even to their interest.”
This statement doesn’t make much sense, because as you certainly know, Red Hat did not intend to use this name at the beginning. At first it was the “Red Hat Project” and later the Fedora project approached Red Hat and suggested to work together, because the goals were rather similar. Red Hat thought it was a good idea and also took the name Fedora over for this project.
> I guess there’s different ways to interpret this.
yes but the only right way is to say corporate desktops for linux are great but if you think a 48x cdrom means it fits 48 CD’s then stick with windows.
So, you spent $120 buying the cheapest verson of Red Hat three times? Didn’t you get what you paid for? Wasn’t there a CD in the box? In exchange for your $120, did Red Hat agree to stay in the retail Linux business forever, no matter what?
Grow up. You paid your money, you got your box. That’s all Red Hat owes you.
Everyone here claiming RedHat has contributed open source software more than others all together should apologise. RedHat contributed software for their own distro and some kernel enhancements which just aren’t used by all the dustributions at all, and aren’t included in the official kernel (thank you Linus Torvalds).
In the end, they just didn’t contribute anything relevant. The same happens with many other distributions, for that matter.
The real contributions came from Linus Torvalds and the kernel Team, GNU Foundation (like bash and gcc), XFree, KDE, Gnome, MySql, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, TeX/LaTex, Conectiva Crystal theme, etc. This are the real contributions you use. Distributions just don’t had much to this software unless an adapted and compiled binary, and you can always move to “Linux from scratch”.
The distribution which manages to put this software all together in a usable way will be the best you can get, but remember that they didn’t contribute anything relevant unless paying some project developers (and annoying others). A coin has two sides.
If they want to stop making a personal desktop of RedHat that’s just fine, this way they will not cripple KDE anymore and will not provoque Kdevelopers anymore.
I read the article, but found no mention of the KDE version in Fedora. Will the Fedora KDE be a modified KDE, as it was in Redhat 9, or will Fedora KDE be standard? Just curious.
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/index.html
I had wondered when someone was going to do this. It seems to me that they can package this up and sell it. The GPL allows it.
RedHat contributed software for their own distro and some kernel enhancements which just aren’t used by all the dustributions at all, and aren’t included in the official kernel
You mean the 2.6 kernel doesn’t have NPTL in it which takes linux from 2000 threads to 50,000? funny I thought they did after two redhat employees wrote it. huh..
Go to gcc’s homepage and look up Contributors the fact that “Feel free to contact [email protected] or [email protected] if you have been left out or some of your contributions are not listed.”
the fact redhat is the one handling contributions says enough but they also employ full time developers for the project that every distro gets.
I could go on and on with sevral projects (especially the kernel) but my dinner is getting cold.
rhavyn, don’t assume everybody is a freeloader. I bought Suse 9.0 also Red Hat which to me was the biggest mistake. Suse is great. The new 9.0 is so much better than Red Hat. To me Suse is the most polished Linux distro I ever tried.
I think if some of the “hardcore” Linux fans continue to isolate their friends in the way they do, Linux development is going to become a very lonely place to be.
J
the fact redhat is the one handling contributions says enough but they also employ full time developers for the project that every distro gets.
I could go on and on with sevral projects (especially the kernel) but my dinner is getting cold.
The fact that some developers that are the PR of some project give their email for contact doesn’t mean RedHat is supporting the project alone (the only project I know about is CygWin which they stoped funding, if I am updated). Many other distributions have full time employees on dozens of projects.
This distributions contribute like RedHat.
I have nothing special against RedHat, I only think that RedHat has a big marketing and a small give away. They prefer “return of investement” and desktop for home users who download for free the ISOs just doesn’t pay back (See Mandrake Club).
Hope your dinner was still hot enough.
I bought Suse 9.0 also Red Hat which to me was the biggest mistake.
Thank god SuSE are available, this also offer more compiled software than any RedHat I have seen. I also pay for my Linux distros CD/DVD.
Most of Red Hat contributions are included in the main kernel. They also contributed to Gnome. They created Orbit. They created the Red Hat Bluecurve theme, the RPM package manager.
The real contributions came from people like Alan Cox who works for Red Hat. Now they own Cygnus, the main manteiners of gcc. Gcc 3 is based in egcs. Cygnus created egcs.
See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/ 2000-August/msg00139.html for exemple.
According to several comments @ /. digital camera’s work good in GNU/Linux. Someone even stated it worked better in GNU/Linux than in Microsoft in some circumstances.
and RPM used to stand for RedHat Package Manager that SusE, Mandrake and other distros are using….
I had the good fortune of actually meeting Mr. Szulik in person when he came to my university a week ago. He clarified some of the issues that seems to have gotten a lot of people angry at RedHat.
For one, dropping RHL is in part due to the fact that they could not offer support to people who were heavily modding their machines (ie installing lots of new patches and stuff like that) or people who kept on updating their machines and expected binary compatibility. These people expected support, but RH just could not meet their needs.
Also the difference between the enterprise version and Fedora should be clear. Since the enterprise version is targeted towards corporate environments, stability and security are key, not features or being bleeding-edge. That is why the enterprise version is still using the 2.4 kernel. Moreover, it is also important for corporations to maintain binary compatilibity with proprietary software such as Oracle databases or SAP. That is why the release cycle for the enterprise version is longer. They want to maintain binary compatibility and have it certified to work with the propriety software that businesses run.
What Szulik meant about linux not being ready for the desktop was that for the average user, it really isn’t. He told the audience that he tried to have his father install RH 9, but his father was unable to do it. This was after his father had 2 hours of phone support (a situation an average person may have). For the average user, linux is not ready. But for some people it is, and Szulik made it clear that for those people (the somewhat adventurous ones) Fedora will fill their needs. RH still has engineers working on Fedora everyday, so they are not abandoning consumer linux totally. They are just not doing the same amount of testing in Fedora as they did in RHL. This is also not an endorsement for Microsoft. The man hates them with a passion.
Also, a few things that I thought were interesting:
– RHL brought in about $9 million a year, which RH has to make up; overall, Szulik said that the decision was tough, but it had to be made
– At one point RH was worth about 16 billion dollars and was considering to buy… NOVELL
– As other people have said, RH does employ a lot of linux luminaries and does contribute to the community quite a bit
Overall, Szulik seemed like a nice guy and is committed to open source and the community. This is a guy who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and could have walked away a very happy man, but stuck on… so there is some credit there IMHO. BTW, I’ve never used RedHat, at least not for for longer than a day. I run Gentoo right now… whatever suits you.
After reading the 5cents worth people are contributing to this discussion, some people here still wonder why there is a dearth of decent ISV’s. Its the old, “I want software but I don’t want to pay” syndrom.
Apple is a small market, however, the people are willing to pay for the software. If the software is $600 but is useful and improves productivity, they’ll pay for it.
Here we have people who whine about $179 for Red Hat Enterprise WS. Wow-wee, a whole $179 for an operating system. Whats that? 4 weeks worth of saving for the average student; assuming they get the student allowance plus has a small part time job. You can’t honest tell me that we have 50 people here on skid row, living under a bridge and would find it difficult to purchase Red Hat Enterprise WS.
I am looking forward to seeing how Codeweavers progresses, hopefully in around 1 1/2 – 2 years, wine Windows support becomes good enough to virtually run any application off the shelf. If by then I can do that, then I will build or purchase a dual Opteron system with Linux loaded, however, until then I’ll stick with what I have, an eMac. Sure, it doesn’t set the world alight in terms of performance, but it does what I need it to do.
Wow, you have no idea what you’re talking about if you really think that the only things Red Hat has contributed are for it’s own distro. Lets see, off the top of my head …
These are employees that Red Hat employed last time I checked, feel free to correct me if they’ve moved on or I get any incorrect.
Kernel team: Alan Cox, Steven Tweedie, Arjan van de Ven, Ingo Molnar. Nope, none of those guys have contributed anything of significance to the kernel outside of Red Hat’s distro.
Gnome: Havoc Pennington, Owen Taylor (I know there are several others including the person who wrote ORBit). But, who cares about gnome-terminal, gconf or maintaining Gtk+.
Jeremy Katz, et al who work on Anaconda which is now being worked on by debian to use for their installer.
Mike Harris who is very active in enhancing X, especially the radeon driver.
Last time I checked, Red Hat also employed some of the gcc maintainers and the glibc maintainer.
I mean, look at that list, Red Hat is hardly contributing any code to the open source community at all. chicobaud is right, down with Red Hat those freeloaders.
Please note the sarcasm before responding.
RPM was not contributed by RedHat. Some RedHat developers worked on it WHILE BEING PAID FOR IT BY CALDERA! Yep, Caldera gave the money to RedHat to develop RPM.
RPM was and is, RPM Package Manager.
RPM was not contributed by RedHat. Some RedHat developers worked on it WHILE BEING PAID FOR IT BY CALDERA! Yep, Caldera gave the money to RedHat to develop RPM.
Well I do actually feel kind of sorry for Ransom Love. The only “crime” he committed as a CEO of a Linux company was saying he preferred the BSD license over the GPL. Apart from that, Caldera did a decent amount of work.
I am sure that if given the chance and he knew about what is happening now, he would have looked for a different investor.
As for SCO today, they’re not interested in selling a product. 6 months ago I inquired about purchasing a copy of UnixWare. This inquiry was via email. I didn’t receive a reply at all. Is this the type of sales customer service one would expect from a company trying to sell a product? I would have expected “thank you for your inquiry…”. Nope, not one reply. I would just love to hear from a SCO employee, either current or former, about why their sales team and customer service sucks. Why when I am in Australia I have to ring a STD toll number just to get in contact with a SCO sales representative in Australia at a cost of 40-90cents a minute.
Imagine if they left SCO alone and Caldera focused on what we have today. We would have a company growing, not dying. A desktop Linux gaining traction rather than staying static.
Hopefully people will realise that it is SCO of today and the Canopy Group TODAY that are causing problems, no Ransom Love.
look at the last line at RPM’s homepage
http://www.rpm.org/RPM-HOWTO/overview.html
“While RPM was _completely_ written by Red Hat, Inc., its operation is based on code written by BOGUS (PM and PMS).”
Caldera was buried by the FUD spread by RedHat employees and affiliates. For whatever reason, this FUD spread like wildfire in the US. I still consider OpenLinux 1.1 as the best distro of it’s time. And, Caldera did, actually, contribute a lot of code to the community, which is actually used today (for example, in the TCP/IP stack).
And paying RedHat to develop RPM seems an excellent contribution, too, as RPM is now widely used by distro vendors such as RedHat, SuSE and Mandrake.
Wow, you have no idea what you’re talking about if you really think that the only things Red Hat has contributed are for it’s own distro. Lets see, off the top of my head …
These are employees that Red Hat employed last time I checked, feel free to correct me if they’ve moved on or I get any incorrect.
I think I have an accurate idea, thank you. The rest of us just can’t be as smart as you are. Have patience.
I never said RedHat didn’t contribute to OSS ! I said they didn’t contribute anything relevant besides CygWin and some (but not all) additional libs and kernel hacks for !! 2.4 !! Linux kernel.
If those employees got out of the projects would the projects die ? I don’t think so. Maybe Gnome.
I have to remember there are other developers on this projects and they get payed (fortunately I must had) from other distributions which give as many or more than RedHat.
I think I better repeat that I don’t have nothing special against RedHat, it’s just unfair that so many users think RedHat invented Linux as it is today, they didn’t.
Many “contributions” of RedHat came from colaboration with other developers, distributions and bussiness …
and RedHat always (or too many times) tried to get the full credit from it (no colaboration solidarity). Yep, they got some angry people in return.
RPM was not contributed by RedHat. Some RedHat developer
So that everybody gets a good example. Today it’s know has redhat packaging manager (was the ancient PPM).
You know what? It’s not for Szulik or anybody else to decide for the rest of the world if Linux is ready or not or to tell them what OS to use.
I will not upgrade until 2.6 is distributed.
2.6 is an option for mandrake 9.2, and a fresh 2.6 compiles with no problems under it as well. You shouldn’t really be waiting any longer if that’s what’s stopping you!