“An attorney for Microsoft argued in court on Monday that Red Hat Inc. had failed to popularize the Linux computer operating system because of its own shortcomings, not because of any interference from Microsoft. Cross-examining Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Michael Tiemann, Microsoft attorney Stephanie Wheeler said Red Hat had spent little money on research and development, and dedicated few of its employees to winning over software developers to write programs for Linux.” Read the report at ZDNews.
Microsoft Grills Red Hat Exec in Court
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This is bull…
RedHat fulfills a different purpose in the opensource market than MS.
RedHat makes distributions. Not OS’s.
Their contribution to the popularity of Linux is that they make it
usable for normal people. That doesn’t require as much R&D as when MS
is developing a whole OS.
They also contributed buy employing Alan Cox which (not matter how
much it costed) is a major contribution to the evolution of the 2.0/2.2
kernels. And Rasterman, not to be forgotten.
MS doesn’t understand the opensource. – Hope the judge do.
No matter if RH did good to the open source or not, the fact is that this person was there to testify that Ms was a problem at RH’s market. But, if RH wanted to have a market, they should have done more product research and employ more developers and bring Linux to the mainstream, which the same way any other “non open souce” company works. Why? Because the “market” (this place where people are buying goods), works with money. You need to pay money to buy something. Similarly, Open Source or not, at the end of the day, RH needs money, as any other company needs to satisfy its needs and its shareholders. The “market” does not understand open source or not, they understand “what do I get for what I am paying for”.
Being “romantic” in such business and advocate about Freedom, does not work well in our capitalistic world. Money, hard work and research talks. Sorry.
“RedHat makes distributions. Not OS’s.
Their contribution to the popularity of Linux is that they make it usable for normal people.”
First of all, I would argue that Red Hat is not usable for most computer users. Second, R&D is not the issue here. The issue is that Red Hat didn’t spend money on marketing. Microsoft has a point there. Red Hat should have had people out there meeting with major software vendors saying “This is why you need to write software for Linux.” That is where Red Hat is failing. Not in the R&D department, but in the marketing department.
“That is where Red Hat is failing. Not in the R&D department, but in the marketing department.”
What the MS lawyer peckers are saying is that MS are not guilty of illegal business practices because RedHat didn’t spend enough on R&D and marketing. And you are agreeing with them.
We all know that this is legalese horse crap right?
If Microsoft has used its position to pressure OEMs to cease selling machines with Linux on them, which I believe it has been proven they have, then this is illegal and this is what they are in court for. RedHat’s R&D and Marketing, or lack there of, is irrelevant.
“MS doesn’t understand the opensource. – Hope the judge do.”
My experience with judges and anything technical is that they can’t find their mouse with both hands. It’s too bad really. If the law makers of this country are going to be given power to make laws and uphold laws in the technical arena, then I think they should be required to demonstrate a certain level of technical ability and understanding first.
Come on we all know Red Hat introduces incompatibilities into its OS so thats its no longer compatable with linux. And because its the biggest its pulling ppl away from linux. This is worse than ms as they hardly ever do that (if they did i wouldnt be able to run 3.1 or 95 apps in win2k) its rather ironic here they are complaing ms dosent make it easy for them.
and we all know crack is bad for your mental health
I wonder what percentage $18.8m is of Red Hat’s budget? $18.8m is a lot of cash for R&D in a small company. Now days, I bet most of MS’s R&D cash is invested in determining the next company or product to buy.
Innovation, my foot. MS Credo: Imitate, integrate, and sufficate the competition.
BeOS is anticompetitive. I can’t run dem RPMs on it!
<p>(Redhat’s modified kernels are open source, as is most of the system. Care to add detail?)
“If Microsoft has used its position to pressure OEMs to cease selling machines with Linux on them, which I believe it has been proven they have, then this is illegal and this is what they are in court for. RedHat’s R&D and Marketing, or lack there of, is irrelevant.”
This is nothing more than Red Hat whining because they are going down the drain. Bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what Microsoft did or did not do. It wouldn’t have changed the outcome. The people who want Linux on their systems are smart enough to load it themselves. And face it: Linux is a niche market. This means that it is not cost effective for PC manufactuers to tool up for pre-imaged Linux hard disks. This means that it is going to cost the end user more to get a PC pre-loaded with Linux than with Windows anyway because the vendor incurs increased production and support costs. It’s simply not cost effective for the vendor or the end user to pre-load Linux.
<em>Come on we all know Red Hat introduces incompatibilities into its OS so thats its no longer compatable with linux. And because its the biggest its pulling ppl away from linux. This is worse than ms as they hardly ever do that (if they did i wouldnt be able to run 3.1 or 95 apps in win2k) its rather ironic here they are complaing ms dosent make it easy for them.</em><BR><BR>
Hmm, that’s funny. I can download source code for Linux and it’ll compile just fine on any flavor of Linux I try it on. Red Hat is a distribution. There are a ton of other distributions out there. And, I hate to tell you this, but M$ does this and will be doing this in the future (just look at the next couple of releases of Windows coming down the pike. I don’t see them being backwards-compatible). M$ stifles the competition, and that’s the bottom line.
I dont use Red Hat myself but my friends who do oftern ask me for help (cause ive programed *nix machines before). Basically they seem to make every .x release differnet to the previous in stupid ways. Perhaps this isnt the case but it really appears to me like they are doing it deliberatly, if i remember correctly in 7.1 or 7.2 they changed the basic sym links to the kernal so many apps couldnt find the relevant files. Why would u do this?.. basically fixed it by creating another sym link to where the real file was.. but this only fixed it for some simple scripts that were fooled. Why would u move these files? If Red Hat was really as concered baout the whole linux community as they try make out they would even consider being bought by AOL/ Time warner? They are just sucking u in and will try force u to be as Red Hat centric as MS pushes u to be MS centric.
Um about compatability what they hell are u talking about.. almost every dos program i have i can run under win2k or win XP.. .. come to think of it isnt that compatable overkill i mean dos apps in WinXP ? still useful to some ppl though and a hell of a lot better than recompiling after fixing script and library problems between .x RH releases. I dont even have to recompile my dos programs.. ! that i wrote when i was 11, 14 years ago!!!
They offer their product for free, which means no revenue. No revenue means no possible way for there to be lost revenue. Heres the math for you 0-0=0, easy huh? And bakasmack you still don’t get it, ms putting pressure on oems wasn’t illegal (its wrong, but not illegal, or indicitive to an antitrust). As it has been hammered out in countless other threads ms’s tactics were wrong, underhanded and dirty, but not illegal (and the first person who says they are illegal show us where, in any federal or state law books, their practices are illegal). If linux distros want to take away windows users from ms make a product to fit their needs, don’t make a product to fit a niche market need and then sue because 10 million housewives aren’t rushing out to buy it (or download it, since I’ve never met a linux/bsd user who actually paid for their distro).
The issue is not whether RH has/had a good product, did enough marketing, etc., etc.
“In direct testimony last week, Tiemann told the judge that computer makers had rebuffed his attempts in recent years to pre-install the Linux operating system on their machines because of fears that Microsoft would retaliate.”
The question is whether RH (and others, of course) was denied the possibility of being exposed to the ruthless demands of the consumer participants in an open OS market because of illegal behavior on MS’s part. Not whether RH would have succeeded had they had the opportunity. Let’s stay on point.
Cross-examining Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Michael Tiemann, Microsoft attorney Stephanie Wheeler said Red Hat had spent little money on research and development, and dedicated few of its employees to winning over software developers to write programs for Linux.
I’m sorry but who’s on trial here, Red Hat or Microsoft? Does it matter how well Red Hat runs its marketing? The point was/is that Microsoft blackmailed companies like Dell and Gateway into only allowing them to use their OS.
>They offer their product for free, which means no revenue.
Red Hats product is not really the Linux OS (although it can and is bought by companies). Their product is providing service and support which DOES cost money.
And being the second most popular server OS in the world (and the fastest growing – figures from IDC) hardly makes it a niche market.
No matter if RH did good to the open source or not, the fact is that this person was
there to testify that Ms was a problem at RH’s market. But, if RH wanted to have a
market, they should have done more product research and employ more
developers and bring Linux to the mainstream
This just in if Poland changed its national anthem to a Deutchland Uber Alles Germany would not have
crossed the border. Listen to understand MS behavior read less Adam Smith and more Mario Puzo.
I got a good laugh out of your post, especially because of its ring of truth.
To answer Eugenia:
No matter how the “market” is, arguing that RedHat is responsible for the success of Linux is just plain wrong.
Windows is a product of Micorsoft and Microsoft alone. If anyone is responsible for the success of Windows, it’s Microsoft.
RedHat doesn’t have the same relationship to Linux. If Linux does bad, it’s not RedHats fault alone and you can’t go pointing fingers at RedHats marketing budget and blame them!!
The Linux marketplace is not build around one company!
Maybe RedHat in the position the play in the Linux market thinks they have better ways to spend their money that evangelism and TV-commercials? Who are MS to judge how you best run an open source company?
That is kind of funny, but it shows the kind of slant I’ve come to expect from this. If one didn’t know any better, for the headline alone, one would think that rh was on trial.
I’m sorry but who’s on trial here, Red Hat or Microsoft? Does it matter how well Red Hat runs its marketing? The point was/is that Microsoft blackmailed companies like Dell and Gateway into only allowing them to use their OS.
If Microsoft’s lawyers can show that Red Hat was not doing everything they could to make their distribution a viable option for the desktop, then that puts some doubt into the idea that Microsoft was responsible for OEMs not picking up Red Hat. If Red Hat’s marketing sucks, then why should the OEMs waste their time and resources supporting the product? The OEMs have enough trouble diversifying their product line with multiple processor manufacturers (remember Gateway dropping AMD?), never mind operating systems.
Microsoft spends money talking to developers and finding out how they can improve their platform for application vendors. When they released Windows95 and the game developers all thumbed their noses at it, MS talked to the game developers to find out what they had to do to get games running on Win95, so the end users (gamers in this case) weren’t either booting out of Win95 to play games, or not installing Win95 at all. Eventually that effort became DirectX, and Win9x is now the dominant gaming platform for PCs (whereas it was MS-DOS before). If MS hadn’t spent the time and money figuring out what developers wanted to put the games on Win9x, they would’ve had a fragmented market. They might have still dominated the desktop market, but they’d still have people booting into DOS to play games.
To further decrease any of Red Hat’s credibility in saying that MS kept them out of the desktop market, they could probably introduce Red Hat’s statements to the press that Linux is not ready for the desktop, and Red Hat’s focus on enterprise servers. Unfortunately, those are more recent statements than the timeframe the case is addressing, so I don’t know whether or not that’d be relevant. I can say that’s not exactly good marketing if you’re trying to get your product pre-loaded by the major OEMs. They might give you a spot on their servers, but certainly not their desktops.
“And being the second most popular server OS in the world (and the fastest growing – figures from IDC) hardly makes it a niche market.”
These statistics don’t tell the whole truth. In the coorporate world, it is far from the second most popular server OS. It may be the second most popular if you include every tom dick and harry running a web site on their DSL line But once again, the average person doing this is a hobbyist who is going to install Linux on their own anyway.
But as far as major corporations that companies like Dell sell major server orders to, they simply aren’t running Linux. If they are buying Intel servers, they are running NT. If they want UNIX, they aren’t buying Intel systems. They are buying SUN or HP or IBM RISC based systems.
By the way, I’m curious where Red Hat gets off making these claims anyway. After all, I can call up Dell or IBM and order a preloaded Linux system anyway.
Most companies don’t offer Linux preloads for one simple reason: It’s not economically viable. They don’t want to have to support it.
“And being the second most popular server OS in the world (and the fastest growing – figures from IDC) hardly makes it a niche market.”
Hey blu this topic is about DESKTOPS, not SERVERS. Why not bring up toasters while your mentioning stuff that isn’t involved in this topic.