“Could Red Hat become the next Microsoft — that is, could it become the dominant (not necessarily domineering) operating systems provider? What a ridiculous proposition, you might say. How could a little company that provides Linux open source software hope to topple Microsoft?” The editorial is at ZDNews. In another Red Hat related article, LinuxDevices wondering “What’s up with Red Hat’s embedded strategy?“
Is Red Hat Going to Be the Next Microsoft?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Eugenia – did you intentionally capitalize “Be” in the headline?
Yes, we always capitalize the important/longer words and all the verbs to any headline.
It has nothing to do with “Be” if that’s what you’re saying.
Well, it might happen .. IF the anti-trust suit forces Microsoft to open up its APIs. Otherwise, Linux will never have a chance as long as MS owns the file formats, and neither will anybody else.
And do you think things would really be any better if Redhat was in control? Already, to be able to use Redhat’s software update service (at least in RH7.2), you have to give them your life history, hand over your first born, and submit to a rectal exam.
And God forbid we ever have a situation where AOL was in control
For that to happen, Linux (probably thru heavy usage of KDE) would have to become a desktop OS, and beat Windows. Frankly I love Open source as much as the next Linux zealot, but Linux is not ready to be a desktop OS, and it probably will never be. It’s just another Unix, and like every Unix it is rich, complex and designed for server environement. KDE or Gnome are cool but they can’t hide the complexity of the operating system behind, and any change to the OS itself needs to be done manually by editing text file (which happen to be different on every distro). A good desktop OS is not just good looking windows and toolbar, it is an OS where everything can be changed without EVER having to edit a single text file.
Also to get a nice GUI on Linux someone will have to eventually ditch X Windows (the only thing it does right is remote display, everything else is broken/bloated/slow and/or incompatible with your hardware). Running a graphic engined designed in the early 80s for dumb terminals on a graphic chips that can have over 70 million transistors is like running a Cray with MS-DOS.
i am hoping for linux success just like the next open source advocate. btu let us see where redhat is now… Linux has something like 1% of the market(desktop?) and redhat has about 50% of the linux users. so thats .5% of the market… i would say this is an uphill battle.
The impression I get is not that he thinks Red Hat will replace Microsoft, but instead become a “Microsoft” in the linux and then server markets.
Red Hat is a long way off … besides, everyone I know who uses Linux doesn’t use Red Hat — they actually hate it.
But I would compare Red Hat to MS for that fact they they like to take something that works and complete screw with it.
Apparently for the media, Red Hat IS linux. Linux is Red Hat.
Silly but there is only room for ONE name in the heads of
journalists when it comes to linux and the general public too.
The better question is: Could any software company become
the next microsoft?
I say no.
How many things had to come together for microsoft to be able
to get where it is today? watch revenge of the nerds to get
some idea.
Personally I don’t use Redhat. Nothing personal really just
how it worked out. I use SuSE and OpenBSD.
I guess your reasoning shows why Apple’s OS X with it’s Unix core system cannot be ready for the average user.
I’m also wondering why Hollywood is using Linux to do their animation when the X system is so much useless.
>I’m also wondering why Hollywood is using Linux to do their animation when the X system is so much useless.
X doesn’t render, it just displays. They have an app that renders the image in memory and saves the frame to disk.
Microsoft=Evil
I don’t use Red Hat because I’m real “lEeT” so:
Red Hat=Evil
therefore:
Red Hat=Microsoft
Wonderful reasoning (aka FUD).
…is that RedHat must make their products self hosting.
What I mean is that there are a good number of applications shipped with RedHat, which do not compile on RedHat.
For whatever reason, Caldera is the hated stepchild of the Linux community, but one thing they have always done well is sell a system that is compatible with itself.
The thing about Windows is that very little is configurable with or without a gui.
Linux is a good desktop system. Most users don’t need or want to configure everything, but for those who do, they can.
Windows is the dominant desktop system today because it leveraged its MS-DOS monopoly into the world of guis. Talk about the Linux’s command line. I’d argue that X is a much more powerful and useful system for most desktop users than Win32, and it is supported on a lot more hardware than Win32, which only runs on i86.
Yes, Linux will supplant Windows as the dominant desktop system not because people want so badly – most computer users are neutral on such things and tend to stick with what they’re used to. But corporations want Linux very much for cost/performance reasons and governments worldwide will mandate Linux (many already have). Because people will be used to Linux at work and in schools they’ll have no problems regarding it as a superior desktop system to Windows.
Well, it might happen .. IF the anti-trust suit forces Microsoft to open up its APIs. Otherwise, Linux will never have a chance as long as MS owns the file formats, and neither will anybody else.
Well, for one, you don’t need MS file formats and APIs to work out. You have to be smart. First, target a couple of niches Microsoft doesn’t care of; get their market and start earning money. Once you capture these niches (by for example, having deals with ISVs and IHVs from the niches), you expand and expand to new niches. Sure, it is extremely slow; but the results are best. I know of no one who would buy Linux to run Windows software; for one there won’t be any support whatsoever. As for file formats; if Sun actually hired more than 2 full time staffs (e.g. 20) you can bet they have full 100% compatiblity with Office.
So in the end, Linux businesses don’t need the DoJ to fight for them; they can do it themselves.
Windows is the dominant desktop system today because it leveraged its MS-DOS monopoly into the world of guis. Talk about the Linux’s command line. I’d argue that X is a much more powerful and useful system for most desktop users than Win32, and it is supported on a lot more hardware than Win32, which only runs on i86.
Wow, you are very fair when comparing. ou are comparing either an API or Windows 9x with something newer.
1) Windows NT is mostly portable. This is proven with a port to PPC in NT 4; and a port to Itanium (IA64) with Windows XP.
2) Windows NT graphical engine is much more advance then X11. For one; it supports a different resolution for each user (very useful for my family; I and my brothers like a higher resolution but my parents prefer something like 800×600). Also, WinNT supported alpha transperancy and anti aliasing way before XFree thought of it (and it is still no existant in the X11 specification).
As for hardware; that’s relative. WinNT has much more support GPU and monitor drivers than XFree ever had.
Yes, Linux will supplant Windows as the dominant desktop system not because people want so badly – most computer users are neutral on such things and tend to stick with what they’re used to. But corporations want Linux very much for cost/performance reasons and governments worldwide will mandate Linux (many already have). Because people will be used to Linux at work and in schools they’ll have no problems regarding it as a superior desktop system to Windows.
Most corporations are switching the backends to Linux (not the desktops). In governments, only third and second world countries are pushing Linux. In other countries like Germany and France; it is to reduce reliance on Microsoft – not because of cost problems. In education, 47% of the market is own by Apple; and Apple latest OS; OS X, has no less features than Linux. In fact, I haven’t seen much schools that use Linux exclusively; except in universities among students of Linux-related courses.
And BTW, Linux desktop share drop to below 1%…. which isn’t that impressive. In case you see me as a anti-Linux troll, I’m using Linux (though I’m stuck on Windows till a month or two later) and prefer it over Windows; not because Windows is bad; but because Windows doesn’t allow me to do the things I like to do which average consumers wouldn’t be interested in anyway.
Redhat is not going to be the dominant OS provider. Not
within the next few years atleast. To become that, the
desktop market must be taken over. And Linux (or most other
*nixes except maybe MacOS X) just isnt good enough for that yet. For home users it KDE probably is, but for corporate needs its far from usable. Heck, just providing a single-signon feature and sharing files in a fairly secure matter
is hell. And thats just som _very_ basic features. The 2 above one can probably overcome with carefully carved administrator work(except letting stupid people easily share a folder). Its rather far from the Windows world, where you install a win2k on a machine, get your login/password and roll on. Easy to share files. The printers are detected for you, a few clicks and outlook is up with your mail set up. a few more clicks and your colleague(and only him) can fetch documents from your machine.
And if anyone must argue that M$ crash/sucks/is insecure, you dont get it. Thats just the microsofts implementation that sucks, the idea and user experience is great and can be implemented in another/better way.
But time will show. And I anyway predict that in 5-7 years the world looks diffrent.
The linux community thinks Microsoft is Evil, I don’t. But if you look at the way Microsoft makes business (which some of it is wrong, and should be corrected) Redhat follows, slowly.
So if the story would have been, “Redhat, the new Microsoft of Linux based OSes”, I would have agreed.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t like Redhat after having to have to use their low quality distribution. I am all but impressed by far.
You comments regarding how WinNT was ported to PPC and the latest ports to the Itanium is barely a foot note. Can you, right now, go and buy a copy of Windows that will run on Sparc? How about PPC? How about S/390? How about any number of processors out there?
Right now, you can pick up a distro of Linux that will run on just about every processor currently available and even a few that aren’t readily available.
I am not an expert when it comes to X, but I do believe that you can work the scripts to read a user specific script in that user’s home directory. This would then allow X to support different resolutions for different users. You just need to know how to set that up. Sure, right now it is more difficult. However, you know what? Someone may very well read this and see if they can put that together. Then they might even write a simple TCL/TK application that will allow the resolution to be changed. If you have X setup to support multiple resolutions, this can be done of the fly.
Look, you really just can’t compare Apples to Semis. They are both really good at what they do and that is that. Windows has it’s place and Linux has its place. I really wish that people would stop comparing certain trivial technical aspects of these two operating systems, when they really only know a smidgen about the other one.
Personally, I am a Microsoft Certified Professional that has spent more then 3 years building, repairing, managing and administrating Windows based systems. I have also spent that same time running Linux at home, running a Linux Users Group and studying up a considerable amount on how Linux functions. Both Operating Systems have their strong points, both have their weak points.
I can get Linux to do things that are simply not possible under Windows and I can get Windows to do some things that are currently not possible under Linux. Here are two examples:
Run Filesharing for 25 people for the low price of “Free”
-Only Linux LEGALLY can do this
Run DirectX Games without a single “problem”
-Currently only available on Windows
You comments regarding how WinNT was ported to PPC and the latest ports to the Itanium is barely a foot note. Can you, right now, go and buy a copy of Windows that will run on Sparc? How about PPC? How about S/390? How about any number of processors out there?
Accept for Apple, no one else is using PPC for servers. IBM is using a almost similar type of processors by the way. Sparc is made by their archrival; and I highly doubt there would be much demand. And the same goes for the rest of the processors. Microsoft isn’t that stupid to port to platforms it knows it won’t make money. Red Hat is also following the same strategy.
But what about workstation. Microsoft knows for a fact there isn’t any business outside of x86. Why? When it made the NT port to PPC; was they any major applications ported/ made available for that edition? Nope. Even the IA64 port, it doesn’t have major Windows applications made available for it.
Right now, you can pick up a distro of Linux that will run on just about every processor currently available and even a few that aren’t readily available.
And yet the most major distribution doesn’t have its distribution available for a lot of platforms. Microsoft doesn’t support many platforms purely as a economic reason. In fact, most Linux companies out there don’t have a version of its distribution for more than 3 platforms.
I am not an expert when it comes to X, but I do believe that you can work the scripts to read a user specific script in that user’s home directory. This would then allow X to support different resolutions for different users. You just need to know how to set that up. Sure, right now it is more difficult. However, you know what? Someone may very well read this and see if they can put that together. Then they might even write a simple TCL/TK application that will allow the resolution to be changed. If you have X setup to support multiple resolutions, this can be done of the fly.
The problem is the most major desktop distributions don’t do this. Apparently, little details like these (and believe me, there is a lot more) are keeping Linux away from general usage.
Look, you really just can’t compare Apples to Semis. They are both really good at what they do and that is that. Windows has it’s place and Linux has its place. I really wish that people would stop comparing certain trivial technical aspects of these two operating systems, when they really only know a smidgen about the other one.
I wasn’t the one who started the comparison. In fact, a guy name junebug started this. I was just correcting all the errors in his/her purely propaganda message.
Run Filesharing for 25 people for the low price of “Free”
-Only Linux LEGALLY can do this
You are forgeting, there are many other free distributions out there that could do this; FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin etc.
Personally, I perfer Linux, BTW.
Well… I’m a 14 year windows os vet and just recently decided to install linux on my machine. I tried both Redhat & Mandrake releases and both made me appreciate windows more. Not because I think Linux is bad or any thing, I actually likes it. Reason why I quickly wiped it from my harddrive after a week is that its too complex for an everyday user and allthough KDE and Gnome appears to make it a bit easier what really kils it to me at least is the driver installation part. In order to install a driver in linux you must be a brain surgeon… If they can simplify the driver installation and keep the RPM thing going I think Linux has a great chance of becoming the #1 OS to use.
Hi all…
No doubt *nix (linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc…) are more and more used, especially in servers. I use at my work several FreeBSD servers, and they rock, i even forget they’re working. With NT sometimes a reboot is needed to get things working.
There are good chances the market share of *nix servers will grow in the future.
Regarding desktop, i’m using FreeBSD as my desktop, it works, gives everything i need, but is very far from what Microsoft did with Windows. I still can’t print with it, and putting the sound card to work took me almost two days 🙂
I think instead of trying to make Linux look like windows (ELX Linux, Lycoris, Gentoo and others), if the efforts were concentraded in making *nix easier to setup and configure, then it could be used by more people, not only some geeks that spent weeks tuning their *nix systems. And please people don’t imitate Microsoft.. Inovate.
I think instead of trying to make Linux look like windows (ELX Linux, Lycoris, Gentoo and others)
—
Excuse me? Gentoo look like windows ? have you at all installed/tried a gentoo stage1 iso ? if so, i doubt you would say that – i think most people that’s installed Gentoo will agree with me that the installation of Gentoo does not, in anyway, at all, compare to _any_ windows installation. yes, you have the _option_ to install _any_ window manager you like in gentoo, be it kde3, gnome 2 rc1/2, gnome 1.4, enlightenment, icewm, fluxbox, blackbox, + a whole lot more. but _nothing_ is a default in gentoo – YOU choose..
I love Redhat linux. To me I can do everything I want and everything that I cound not ever do on windoz. But, you are a fool if you think that Redhat will in the near future will become king of the OS market. *nix is made for people who know what they are doing. And until this problem is fixed windoz will always rule. My thought is that all the old aps like x11, kde, gnome should be dumped and a new interface and new system tools should be build around the old linux kernel with the desktop end user in mind. I hate Mac but something like apple did with OS X to FreeBSD.
As is usually the case, the discussion degenerated into something else, namely usability, which has been discussed to death already and people should know better.
RedHat came to my company recently and tried to push their OS. You almost couldn’t tell the difference from M$ reps… and remember:
In the free Unix world (forget just Linux) they are the dominant force since:
Their product is usually the only known one
Their product is often chosen for all the wrong reasons
Their product is not the best yet most people go for it
They receive the most ISV support
They spread FUD
They make outrageous claims
They gave us a presentation, I was the only one giving them grief in the end for their claims, everyone else was just nodding (and not off). I actually told them they were the Microsoft of Linux (they complained) and that was some time ago so maybe it was me that coined the term :>
Mind you, I use or have used extensively in a professional way and a mission-critical environment pretty much most Unixes out there, I’m not (only) an enthusiast. I like to keep things straight and I’m not a zealot, I just like what works.
They were telling us someone replaced a Solaris box with a PC running Linux and the new server was 20 times faster. When asked what the EXACT configurations of the boxes were, including filesystem and kernel tunings, they had NO idea. Surprisingly, nobody but me jumped and yelled when they said so… I mean, Solaris as an OS is no speed demon (I do my own testing, thank you very much) but I need a bit more info to make my decisions.
Among other unsubstantiated claims, their presentation was pretty much similar to what M$ would have done. The costs for the advanced server product (the one they were primarily pushing) are not even that low and it’s just 2.4.9 with the O(1) scheduler and a few other things and a lot of things left OUT since they’re not stable.
As to the usability of the UI question (gotta keep that degeneration going I guess:) M$ and Apple have HEAPS of professional UI designers and HEAPS of usability engineers and until significant numbers of open source UI developers start approaching things the same way and seriously innovate, don’t expect ANY kind of Unix apart from OSX to make its way to the desktop in a big way. It’s that simple.
All my servers are Unix-based, all my PCs are Windows (OK, I have an HP/UX workstation also but it doesn’t get much use, I use it as a server mostly
I tried using various OSes on the desktop but ultimately I can’t always do my job properly and they go to the land where OSes are eternally blessed.
D
A place that I could see someone (RedHat?) making headway is the groupware market. Outside of M$ Exchange and Lotus Notes, there is next to nothing. In all my time working in various IT departments the ONLY thing that keeps a Windows box on my desk is exchange.
We need something that is has a cross platform client (Linux, Solaris, Mac), on a *NIX server platform.
The “Microsoft of Linux” is the only profitable Linux company. Like it or not, there isn’t profitable hippy free love companies. Unless of course Cuba invades America…
Get real.