Red Hat CEO Is Ready To Squash Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle

[chip]

Originally Posted by FiShy

Year of the linux desktop?

That's next year. Every year.

[elvis]

Originally Posted by chip

That's next year. Every year.

It was 2004 for me, and has been ever since.

I've just completed an automated Linux rollout system for my new employer. I'll be spending next week blowing away all of their Windows workstations and rolling out Kubuntu 12.04 across a big chunk of their fleet.

[Smakked]

Originally Posted by elvis

It was 2004 for me, and has been ever since.

I've just completed an automated Linux rollout system for my new employer. I'll be spending next week blowing away all of their Windows workstations and rolling out Kubuntu 12.04 across a big chunk of their fleet.

Fuck , wish i could do that, we will see what happens when the taker over is done fully.

[platinum]

Originally Posted by chip

That's next year. Every year.

The problem with taking market share is... marketing. Until unix/linux companies realise that their systems need to not just have the functionality, but also have the desirability and good branding/marketing, they are going to be totally outplayed.

Average person doesn't give a toss about open source, if they see a flashy ad for OSX or Windows (or a laptop co-branded with it through a marketing deal), that's what they will buy, and that standard trickles down into schools, workplaces, etc. It takes a lot of balls to be that one guy in the industry who makes a decision to make a shift from the 'standard', if it fucks up, it's their job on the line. If you go with what's known, you at least have some justification.
It's like becoming an expert in 'Gimp' instead of Photoshop, good luck getting a job in the design industry, even if it comes close to doing everything PS does, no one will hire you based on that, since it's an unknown, and goes against the standard.

Microsoft and the likes have the business/branding/marketing knowledge and are very smart in empowering developers with the right tools and running courses/certificates that are engrained deep into so many businesses.

Don't get me wrong, I really do hope RedHat (or Ubuntu, etc) can make some huge inroads, but apart from server-based needs they really only seem popular with tinkerers, embedded devices or situations where paying for an OS isn't going to happen.

[tr3nton]

Originally Posted by platinum

It's like becoming an expert in 'Gimp' instead of Photoshop, good luck getting a job in the design industry, even if it comes close to doing everything PS does, no one will hire you based on that, since it's an unknown, and goes against the standard.

If you can create awesome imagery, do they really care what software you use (whens its no extra cost for them to use said software)?

[platinum]

Originally Posted by tr3nton

If you can create awesome imagery, do they really care what software you use (whens its no extra cost for them to use said software)?

Yep, how hard is it going to be when I employ someone else to make changes/modifications to said imagery if that person leaves employment. Will printers, or other designers who don't use it be inconvenienced when trying to collaborate. What is the longevity of the product (i.e. is it an active project, or will it be left to rot after a year of development). Has it proven itself in the marketplace. Will it look good when going for tenders, and meet standard deliverables at the end of a project to the client (from what I've seen it's support for "PSD" files is a very loosely used term). Who do I call if Gimp stops working on my machine one day and business has to halt work, with PS there's support and updates constantly available, easy business decision there.

80% of this comes from a business perspective, which is where the money is to push things forward. I don't doubt that someone can produce very similar work using both pieces of software though, it's all the issues around it.

[HunterBunter]

Originally Posted by platinum

Who do I call if Gimp stops working on my machine one day and business has to halt work, with PS there's support and updates constantly available, easy business decision there.

Isn't this basically how red-hat made their money? From supporting an OSOP rather than actually selling them?

I suppose there's an opportunity for someone to offer that service for many open source / free softwares.

[lithos]

Originally Posted by platinum

Yep, how hard is it going to be when I employ someone else to make changes/modifications to said imagery if that person leaves employment. Will printers, or other designers who don't use it be inconvenienced when trying to collaborate. What is the longevity of the product (i.e. is it an active project, or will it be left to rot after a year of development). Has it proven itself in the marketplace. Will it look good when going for tenders, and meet standard deliverables at the end of a project to the client (from what I've seen it's support for "PSD" files is a very loosely used term). Who do I call if Gimp stops working on my machine one day and business has to halt work, with PS there's support and updates constantly available, easy business decision there.

I find it very hard to take GIMP seriously as a photo tool (as opposed to something to crank out porn GIFs for your favourite chan) when it still doesn't have native 16-bit file handling. It's "coming", apparently.

So is Christmas.

[platinum]

Originally Posted by HunterBunter

Isn't this basically how red-hat made their money? From supporting an OSOP rather than actually selling them?

I suppose there's an opportunity for someone to offer that service for many open source / free softwares.

Yeah that's it, same with Zend/PHP, mySQL etc - I fully support them as they are basically commercialised (good business model) open source, but they are aimed at developers/server admins not the general public, which is probably where the push needs to go in the 'desktop' world if they want to challenge the big guns.

[cleary]

Originally Posted by platinum

... Who do I call if Gimp stops working on my machine one day and business has to halt work, with PS there's support and updates constantly available, easy business decision there.

80% of this comes from a business perspective, which is where the money is to push things forward. I don't doubt that someone can produce very similar work using both pieces of software though, it's all the issues around it.

Business perspective is fine, but misguided.

Who do you call when PS has an issue? First level tech support... who may or may not understand your issue, may or may not help, and may or may not even get it resolved.

Who do you "call" when gimp has an issue? You go to their support channel and talk directly to _the_people_who_write_the_software_. I hate to think what it would cost to get access to the exact adobe engineer who works on the code that is broken.

Business often finds this difficult to accept when fingers need to be pointed. Perhaps they should consider less covering their arses and more solving the problem at hand.
Fortunately I don't work for a business that has this mentality...

[elvis]

Originally Posted by lithos

I find it very hard to take GIMP seriously as a photo tool (as opposed to something to crank out porn GIFs for your favourite chan) when it still doesn't have native 16-bit file handling. It's "coming", apparently.

So is Christmas.

I find it odd that people keep looking at GIMP like it's the one and only image tool on Linux.

Cinepaint was forked from gimp in the late 90's, and has been used on dozens of feature films for it's support of arbitrary colour depth. The users I support in my job use it every day. The film I recently appeared in the credits for as VFX studio sysadmin was built largely on open source, and relied on Cinepaint for a big chunk of work.

Krita was released as a part of KOffice in 2005, and has supported 16bpp since release.

Why is it that the only comparison people continue to make is GIMP vs Photoshop? Do you people have blinkers on? There are thousands of tools out there for professional content creators, not just those two.

Originally Posted by platinum

Don't get me wrong, I really do hope RedHat (or Ubuntu, etc) can make some huge inroads, but apart from server-based needs they really only seem popular with tinkerers, embedded devices or situations where paying for an OS isn't going to happen.

This has nothing to do with the desktop. It has everything to do with servers.

The statement made about RedHat's CEO was about the server market. That's what he's talking about. The big end of town where big dollars are spent on enterprise systems. This is a market that RedHat is really starting to flourish in, and a market where, by revenue, Microsoft is sitting at 60% and shrinking.

RedHat have stated time and time again that they have no interest in the desktop. Their interest is surviving commercially, and making money for their shareholders. They understand quite well that there's zero point attacking the corporate desktop, as there's little money in it for them. From a profitability point of view, Windows on the desktop itself makes Microsoft very little money. The lion's share of their desktop profits come from MS Office, and they make huge money from MS Server, SQL Server and similar server-side platforms. The sorts of money Microsoft see from Windows licensing on a regular Dell or HP desktop make them single-digit dollars over the life of that system (typically 2-3 years in a corporate environment).

Yet again, people are missing the message here. This was never about "the year of the Linux desktop". RedHat's CEO himself laughs at that phrase, because he knows how pointless it is for him to even consider it. He's throwing the gauntlet down to ISVs who make big money from proprietary server-side software, and challenging them in that market. That's always been RedHat's commercial strength, and that's what has taken them from a small dev shop to a billion dollar a year business. And the growth they're demonstrating in all of their markets (server OSes and management, enterprise virtualisation, enterprise application platforms, enterprise clustering, clustered storage, etc, etc) is astounding. Their revenue from all of these has exploded in a very short amount of time.

Squabbling over a few bucks worth of desktop or tablet OS is not RedHat's interest, and they've been smart to ignore it.

[akashra]

I think the Lindows guy may have said something similar once. How did that work out again?

[HyRax1]

Looks like the world of Windows got a bit smaller in India last year.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/06/u...ndia-last-year

There are a lot of good IT people that come from India, and given their population density, this could be considered serious news for Redmond if growth continues at this rate.

[IKT]

Originally Posted by akashra

I think the Lindows guy may have said something similar once. How did that work out again?

Did he have a business making over $1 billion in revenue?

Clue: some people have more influence than others.

[oclockforlyfe]

There needs to be massive consolidation in the Linux universe. Right now and in the foreseeable future, the distros are just competing with each other, not with Windows. So much overlap and so much resources devoted to fragmentation.

But I don't think Linux will ever get a chance to be a mainstream desktop OS because I reckon in 5-10 years everyone(not us geeks) will be using thin clients connected to the cloud. There won't be a need for a desktop, or for a desktop OS.