[CLUE-Talk] Bruce Peren's talk

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 19:50:54 -0600
Jeff Cann <j.cann at isuma.org> wrote:

> Greetings.
> 
> For those at last night's CLUE meeting, what did you think about the
> threats to Linux by companies such as HP, IBM, Red Hat?
> 
> I personally will consider debian unstable a more viable option than my 
> current Red Hat workstations, after learning about the Advanced Server
> closed license.  I'll have to read more about it and if Bruce's
> statements were accurate (I'm sure they were), I'll have to contact Red
> Hat.  I'm disappointed in their drive to make Advanced Server look and
> feel like an inexpensive UNIX to companies.

I definitely want to hear more on the RH thing. I'm actually surprised
that it hasn't gotten more attention. I have Newsforge, Slashdot, and LWN
(among others) in my RSS feed, and I haven't seen any coverage of their
NDA requirement for their enterprise edition (or didn't notice it). It
certainly violates the spririt of Free/Open software. Maybe that's another
downside to the whole SCO thing, is that it's distracting our attention
from other important matters.

As I find myself building more from source, I find it harder to keep using
an RPM-based distribution, although I could also extend the same thinking
to debs, I suppose. But I note that I don't believe I'll ever really want
to build things such as XFree and glibc from source (I might change my
mind if I get around to trying Gentoo). It's nice to have packages for the
base system stuff. When I build from source, it's because I've found the
packager's choice of configure options to be sub-optimal.

I also find "branding" to be annoying. Does every distribution put their
logo on the KDE and Gnome taskbars? And I'd rather run "printconf" instead
of "redhat-config-printer". Of course, branding is all part of being a
business, so I don't really blame RH, SuSe, et. al.

And, of course, when you look at it from a commercial point of view,
marketing Linux as an inexpensive Unix is understandable. And,
realistically, ignoring whether Linux meets whatever standards the Open
Group has set forth for being able to call something Unix, Linux comes
awfully close to being a Unix OS. So, at least on that point, I don't
understand your disappointment.

I always think about taking things in the balance. Does paying Alan Cox's
salary, for example, mitigate?

> What about other thoughts on his talk?

Even though I enjoyed the Pixar anecdotes, it's too bad that they caused
the tail-end of his talk, which was, I think, what most of us came for, to
be so compressed.

The enterprise community thing is something I think will happen. I think
it will take more time than it took for Apache. The reason is that Apache
came about as part of whole new wave of technology, where it was all new.
Whereas enterprise-class systems are mature, and I think that movement in
those areas is slower, and more conservative. I didn't grok his support
idea, perhaps because of the compression factor. I mean, in general, yeah,
some sort of distrubuted support structure, but didn't he talk about a
distributed cost/revenue model for that (a new breed of LinuxCare)?

I'm far less worried about the U.S. govt's [non]advocacy, than I am about
software patents.

jed
-- 
... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier