Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Feb 2009 10:24 UTC
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They hope that they can just throw something out there and hope that they will then benefit from other peoples' ideas and code because they themselves have ran out of ideas. You can't do that. An open source project needs direction, grounding and adequate incentives for many external contributors to get involved.
You are right about that. More people need to look at Red Hat to see how Open Source is done right.
Red Hat is making a mint from Linux without totally pissing off Open Source supports or customers!
Red Hat has learned how to provide value in what they offer and people will pay for something of value.
Look what happened with Oracle. They tried to under cut Red Hat with Red Hats own product. But they can't offer the value. And that value is knowledge, control of their product time lines and great support.
Yes Oracle can provide a similar product and lower cost support, but are they really knowlageable? Do they really have the skill and support level that Red Hat has? Can they even patch their OS?? And what is the time frame on that patching etc??
Out of that you have Fedora. Red Hat gets MILLIONS of dollars in free R&D by having their normal paid staff to develop on Fedora and roll those well tested pieces up to their enterprise products. Unlike Novell this is not a seperate paid staff that can be cut. These are core Red Hat developers that develop what end up being Enterprise level components on Fedora, have them tested by the millions of Fedora users out there then roll those ideas up. They are not just making Fedora (Like Novell) to please open source users. Fedora is a major piece of their business model on the OS side.
Look what happened with Oracle. They tried to under cut Red Hat with Red Hats own product. But they can't offer the value. And that value is knowledge, control of their product time lines and great support.
Yes Oracle can provide a similar product and lower cost support, but are they really knowlageable? Do they really have the skill and support level that Red Hat has? Can they even patch their OS?? And what is the time frame on that patching etc??
Yes Oracle can provide a similar product and lower cost support, but are they really knowlageable? Do they really have the skill and support level that Red Hat has? Can they even patch their OS?? And what is the time frame on that patching etc??
I can say from regular first hand experience, Oracle support is shit at best. I'd never go with an Oracle product unless I had to just based on support alone.
I completely agree with you on this particular point against Oracle.
Edited 2009-02-24 20:31 UTC




Member since:
2005-07-06
It certainly strikes me as a tad insensitive that they are laying off OpenSuse workers and then hoping that they will still continue to work on the project. If the parent company cannot provide direction for it, why should some former workers who have been sacked do that work for them for nothing? It's possible more outside companies will get involved in the project, but I don't see why they would help the main sponsor out here.
Novell have seemingly fallen into a trap that many companies do when it comes to open sourcing things. They hope that they can just throw something out there and hope that they will then benefit from other peoples' ideas and code because they themselves have ran out of ideas. You can't do that. An open source project needs direction, grounding and adequate incentives for many external contributors to get involved.
Edited 2009-02-24 14:13 UTC