Maxie Spevack, a mouthpiece for the Fedora Project of Linux Distro, Red Hat (Red RHAT), is helping shatter the free love oh so niceness of the Linux community.
Reacting to what must be nothing short of unbridled envy at the recent uptick in the fortunes of other Linux distros such as SLED and Ubuntu, M. Spevack is asking why Red RHAT’s version wasn’t chosen instead in surveys taken by the hardware manufacturers Dell and Lenovo.
He writes, “My entire point with the statistics angle is one of transparency, not one of result. I would love to see how much money Canonical has spent on ShipIt. I would love to see their claims of how many million users they have backed up by some real data, with a disclaimer (like ours) of where the potential fudge factors are. I would find it incredibly interesting to see how much money Canonical spends on Ubuntu every year, and compare that to how much money Red Hat spends on Fedora. It would be interesting to be able to calculate some sort of "cost per user" metric, if you will.”
Since he was on a roll, he continued, “To win a survey like the Dell or Lenovo one requires you to have lots of users, who care enough about the distribution to go and vote for it. But what does it actually MEAN to win a survey like that, from a corporate and financial point of view? Once you are talking about selling machines with a distro pre-installed on them, then someone, somewhere along the chain is getting paid something. The question is who makes the money, how much are they making, and what is the margin? By margin I mean "how much money do you have to spend in order to make 1 dollar?" Are you spending 50 cents? 80 cents? 95 cents? And how do you make the margins tilt as far in your favor as possible?”
Whew!
Even I couldn’t start lobbing SCUDs like that!
Money quote: “Once you are talking about selling machines with a distro pre-installed on them, then someone, somewhere along the chain is getting paid something. The question is who makes the money, how much are they making, and what is the margin?”
Yeah, I’m so not making that up!
However, it goes directly to what I have been saying for a while: drones are preaching the ‘free’ part of open source as an entrepoint into wallets of users and businesses. After you drink their Kool-Aid, you will be stuck with exorbitant ‘services’ fees. Think only banks and Telco’s know how to inflict incessant fee pain? Think again!
Good vibrations seem to be over, as the expected sonic boom announcing the coming of Linux has, dare I say it, fizzled. Now it is survival of the fittest. No more smoking peace pipes, or singing kumba-ya around the campfires. Or whatever it is they do.
The flensing knives are out, and this is shaping out to be an epic battle: The War among Freetards.
I’ll sit back and enjoy this tribal war.
(Feel free to note it down as what is going to happen if, heaven forbid, Linux market share get to be around 10%! The freeloading IBMs of this world will bare their fangs them.)
One word of advice for Red RHAT: Call +1.425.882-8080, beg for forgiveness, admit to violating the Master’s IP and patents, and drink from the proffered cup of interoperability. Come join the continuum and watch your bars of gold-pressed Latinum grow.
Should I charge Red RHAT for this advice? Compliment me here or email me at john.obeto@absolutevista.com.
Visit Microsoft Subnet for more opinions and news. http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/
The Leader in Network Knowledge
Mouthpiece or spokesperson
Actually, Spevack is right. Fedora measures users who do system updates of software. They do not measure or count downloaded release images. For example, I download the UBUNTU, SUSE and Fedora dvds when the come out, just to see what is new. I use a third distribution, so I contribute falsely to UBUNTU's usage count.
Fedora is a development distribution, with lots of development dollars being spent on it. A version's life span is about 1 year, or 7 months after the next release, it is considered legacy and is not supported. UBUNTU has a version that they support for 18 months. Fedora does not have one that they support for that duration. They rely on Red Hat.
Red Hat is a stable stable system, and exceeds the uptimes of Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, GENTOO, and many other distributions. Support is in years.
And Spevak is right. Dell and the others make money with hardware, and of course, a share of the software that is sold. So, I would guess that UBUNTU is giving DELL about $10.00 per copy, for providing UBUNTU. And of course, add to it, the pre-installed disk layouts or support for user problems.
From my personal experience, both UBUNTU and Fedora are superb. My leanings are with Fedora as a more secure product, due to Selinux, a software built-in to verify execution rights of software components. That verification is beyond the normal read-write-execute security constraints imposed by linux systems. UBUNTU does not have it. Fedora also provides all the software on the DVD, not just Gnome or another dvd for KDE or another media for servers.
So, Spevak, the port-parole (spokesperson) is right, and it is insulting to call him a mouthpiece. It is insulting to put him in the same category as a lawyer.
Leslie Satenstein
Montreal, Canada
What does "Red RHAT" mean?
What does "Red RHAT" mean? You do know that the stock symbol is actually RHT, right, and that the company name is not "Red" but "Red Hat"? (Not that, you know, this is a financial story or even a story composed of researched fact by any means. So, your attempt at guessing the company's stock symbol really doesn't make any sense.)
Do you think using words like "internecine", "flensing" (the only blubber around here seems to be coming out of your mouth), and "proffered" will disguise the fact that you don't actually understand the communities you're talking about? If so, well, try again. I bet you used Microsoft Word (R) to come up with those gems, though - I'm so proud of you!
"The war among freetards" - wow.
"Latinum"? Maybe you should spend less time watching Star Trek and more time doing a bit of research into whatever you feel like pissing out during your next episode of frothing Microsoft fanaticism.
Sticks and Stones
Lots of sound and fury and not-so-clever digs coming from you, Mr. Obeto. Talk about being the Microsoft crier -- it's time for you to unplug from the mainframe and think before you throw sticks and stones. You are a whole lot smaller than you used to be, Johnny boy.
Good comments John!
John -
You have lost all credibility with the number of errors in your post (what's Red RHAT?). But even after forgiving
that, I can see that you are completely blinkered on how
you view the world. I *used* to work for MS in Seattle in
the late 80s. I left because they were arrogant and would
not be averse to unscrupulous means to get a sale. You
are drinking from their kool-aid and singing their praises.
As a MS Fanboy, you have not done yourself any form of
justice by trying to talk down the Linux community.
Have a good life. And you would need all the luck MS can
shovel your way.
an OpEnv member