I think his main point is that it's difficult to get a polished, end-user friendly product out of the other guys. I agree that the "going from shrink-wrap to shrink-wrap" is a bogus comment, but I don't think that was the real point. The real point is that he's slamming other community editions and stating that Ubuntu is a better supported and more polished community distro.

I happen to agree - not because Ubuntu is perfect, which it certainly is not, but because I'm a former Fedora user who was ultimately frustrated by the lack of devotion to something that actually worked for end-users.

I agree that Red Hat has every right to charge for services and must do that in order to survive. I think Mark is just trying to position Ubuntu favorably against the other guys. Whether he's successful at that is another question. IMHO, Linux supporters and distros will have to work very very hard to offer a compelling reason for Windows users and sysadmins to switch, and I don't feel that the current tactics of either Red Hat or Novell do that. In my mind, they have to have a compelling community edition in order to seed the earth in preparation for enterprise upselling.

It's rather ironic isn't it ;-) Just a few weeks ago it was announced that the new Ubuntu Edgy Edge operating system will include propriety ATI/NVIDIA kernel modules in it's distribution.

Oh, there's no doubt that Mark is trying to position himself favorably against Red Hat. And fair enough, by the way -- bidness, as they say, is bidness, and Linux is nothing if not a growth bidness. Plenty of room for everyone.

Just differentiate yourself honestly, Captain Ubuntu. Brag about your excellent community and your commitment to the desktop. Your successes speak for themselves. So why stoop to misinformation and FUD? Because you really don't need to, dude. That's all I'm saying. Really.

Michael said:

"Just a few weeks ago it was announced that the new Ubuntu Edgy Edge operating system will include propriety ATI/NVIDIA kernel modules"

Actually Edgy Eft has been out for a good few months (it's the 6.10 release), Feisty Fawn is the upcoming release which will include the Dreaded Binary Blobs, along with a "We've done this to your system, and here's why .. " disclaimer.

Which seems to be the best way to get a usable desktop environment (with bling!) to the end-user, while keeping as much Freedom as possible.

Well, I think that Mark is completely right, and that both Red Hat and Suse will disappear into irrelevance relatively soon.
Whereas I believe that Ubuntu might have a big chance, especially given the recent Vista horror stories AND the proprietary approach you defend.
The real strength of the old open source dream is the "non proprietary" aspect, and the free collaborative and inventive contributions. The 'value added' services you offer are very meager frills, that anyone could offer in order to scrape some money.
But the point, you see, not for you of course, but for quite a lot of us, as strange as it may seem to you, is NOT to scrape some money, it is to change the software world.
And I believe Ubuntu has now picked the chance you gladly threw away.

I don't think that Mark's basic point is "because RHEL is a closed binary, it's proprietary"?. I read Mark's point to be: "Free Software should be freely available". So, that means, the RHEL binaries and updates should be freely available from Red Hat and freely distributable (you can already get the RHEL source freely from Red Hat).

So, to Matt's groceries/entree scenario. Mark suggests that the groceries are already free (i.e. kernel.org, Fedora, etc). He'd like the entree (i.e. RHEL) to be free for pickup if you're going to eat it at home. But if you want to eat at the restaurant, hear the nice music, ask the chef some questions or impress your date, then you're going to have to pay for that service/support. So the entree is no different whether you decide to eat it at home (i.e. RHEL for free without support) or in the restaurant (i.e. RHEL with paid support).

NOTE: This is my take on Mark's post, and the pragmatic "me"? doesn't totally buy into it.

More here

Its Ubuntu Feisty Fawn the version that will include the closed drivers, i think that this is an advantage for end users, i know the problem of the closed drivers but the first i do when i install linux is install the nvidia or ati closed drivers, the opensource aren't efficient enought and the drivers manufacturers showed that they dont think open the drivers, if you want a better open drivers put pressure to the patent system in USA not in a Distro of linux.
With open specs is easy do open sources drivers.

I think Mark's primary goal was to get people to talk about his project....

I am , some what, in agreement with Savio Rodrigues (the takeout/dine in anology)...There was no reason for Redhat, after redhat linux 9 to fork into two distro:rhel and fedora. That decision broke the confidence of many people in that community...It can be argued (from many angles) that fedora is just as comparable to ubuntu.But I beleive the lesson to be learnt is a distro is a bit more than having the latest kernel or window manager..or even innovation. It may be about ideals,commitment and trust.The fact is, something happened after redhats decision and has more to do with peoples trust as opposed to a mere "technical adjustment". The proof: Why did Distros like CentOS and WhiteBox Linux formed after Redhat's decision?

Red Hat Linux had two groups of people complaining: one group complained that software was changed and updated too often, and the other group complained that the software in Red Hat Linux was older than what was available in the community.

Splitting it into a slow moving product (RHEL) and a fast moving community project (Fedora) seems to have addressed that issue.

IMHO it is telling that the community jumped on CentOS and WhiteBox Linux, instead of trying to maintain Red Hat Linux 9 through Fedora Legacy. Clearly there was more demand for the former than for the latter...

With regards to a previous users comment that all it would take is open specs and a change in the patent system to have working 3D drivers? I have to say I'm not so sure...

1. "All I need is specs..."
Hmmm... look at a modern 3D card (and soon to be network cards) are actually multi-pipeline CPUs themselves, where the need is not in having specs to twiddle I/O registers, but being able to code an efficient inverse matrix transform on a particular version of their chipset. While there are plenty of smart people out there (remember Brian Paul from Mesa?) to code GL code, guys like Nvidia have chosen to put parts of their libGL implementation on the card itself. Guess what? It's not just writing simple drivers, especially when chipset pipelines change across different die revisions. Certainly anything can be done, but the time invested in dealing with a manufacturer that obviously doesn't want/can't help you will limit you to people with old video cards. In fact, that's what we have today with linux desktop, great support for old cards that people either don't have, can't get anymore, or can't coexist with playing games with a fast GL stack.

2. "The patent system needs to be changed for this..."
The patent system NEEDS to be changed, but it won't make for open drivers. This is because the basic tenent is that these guys value proposition is in their GL stack, and they are not going to give that up if that's what continues to make money and provide their differentiation. The day they stop making money from high end cards or don't care too (see Intel), they will do an open stack and you'll have the code you were about to write from scratch... maybe it will just take time, and another video card acquisition...

-Alan

How is Mark wrong? You are incorrect, actually, on all marks. They produce a version of their operating system that is meant to be stable and reliable, and just work. That is 6.06, the LTS release. Newer versions have shorter dev cycles than 6.06 did, and newer (possibly unstable) versions of software. They are very careful about changing any code in 6.06, so are very conservative with patches (which are used to ONLY patch bugs and security holes, not install new software). Any new program updates go through extensive testing first. Plus, you can easily purchase extra (non-patch) support for 6.06 easily.
Mark isn't harping on them for doing something he isn't doing yet, he is harping because he is doing something similar without charging EVERYONE who wants that stability, that freedom from worry, and the proprietary vendors ARE. 6.06 is freely available to everyone, and anyone who wants to can CHOOSE to pay for extra support above and beyond the community and the patches and backports, which are going to be the SAME for anyone using 6.06.

Freedom...

If there's no source code for you to modify as you please then it's not free. One point is that if software you use has a bug which is affecting your work, if you have the skills (or people with the skills) you can figure things out and fix it - and preferably tell other people how to fix it too. RHEL is great - but how quick can RH fix that bug that really matters to you? So - the source needs to be readily accessible, even if only a very small minority of customers have the skill or desire to go through it. So long as RH makes that source available, Mark's ranting is really only an attention-grabbing tantrum. If RH is keeping code secret - well that's fine as long as it doesn't contradict the license, but it is not a good way to work. I'd prefer if they had a license saying "you, as a customer, can see the code and modify it for your purposes but have to right to redistribute it". I find I have to fix various tools that I use about 2 or 3 times each year - but after 2-10 hair-rending days the problem is gone and I can lead a normal life again. I pity the fools who pay M$ for incredibly crappy software which they have no hope of fixing even if they are skilled.

Efraim Karsh said "Well, I think that Mark is completely right, and that both Red Hat and Suse will disappear into irrelevance relatively soon."

I'm afraid you are in fairy land if you think Red Hat will disappear relatively soon. It is still by far the most popular distro in business/enterprise use and I think you'll find the the majority of companies are happy enough with them to continue to business with them despite any alternatives, including Oracle's "Unbreakable Linux" hash up. I completely fail to see how Ubuntu expects to gain any ground on the likes of Red Hat and Novell as Ubuntu seems totally disinterested in going for enterprise customers, which is where all the money is.

Supporting SMEs and enthusiasts is all very good, but it doesn't give you the success of Red Hat.

Howard Ming said "There was no reason for Redhat, after redhat linux 9 to fork into two distro:rhel and fedora. That decision broke the confidence of many people in that community"

There was a very good reason for this forking, as Rik van Riel said "Red Hat Linux had two groups of people complaining: one group complained that software was changed and updated too often, and the other group complained that the software in Red Hat Linux was older than what was available in the community."

Red Hat's decision has proven to had a good degree of success. Enterprises get the binary-stable version of Linux they wanted and are clearly happy to pay for and those that use the cutting-edge continue to get a 6 month release cycle for free. I think the big mistake that Red Hat made at the time they did this, which fuelled the criticism everyone seems to remember, is that they didn't tell anyone what they were doing, so it looked like they were just pulling their free distro and starting to charge for it.

I agree completely with the author. Mark's beginning to suffer from Mr. Ellison's brand of FIM (foot-in-mouth) disease and seems to be gaining an increasing apetite for eating the leather that makes his shoes.

RedHat DO NOT charge for the product. They DO charge for the service delivered around that product.

And of course, theres this little issue about the word "free". It stands for freedom, Mark, not free beer.

So if you want free beer, you should stick to your Ubuntu brand free beer. Or choose from the myriad others.

But, as the author says, if you like a little peace of mind, you will pay for Red Hat (or Novell - O now I've said the boo-boo word!! Heaven help me!) for their support contract.

First, given Mark's thoughts about how enterprise linux *should* be, I'd have to ask, what is his motivation to get into the enterprise in the first place? If linux is intended to be free, then stick with the desktop version that he's currently handing out free and having success with. A person's motivation to step into the enterprise is to make money. How is he planning on doing that if he's talking about handing it out for free? I think Mark is beginning to take on a lot of traits of Bill Gates. If there is a successful competitor out there, he cries foul in hopes to eliminate the competition. We saw that after the Novell - MS agreement. Mark steps up to kick Novell while they were down by trying to recruit their developers.

I was hoping that Mark had enough confidence in his product that he can win customers just by quality work. For some reason he finds it necessary to spread FUD about his competition. People get tired of that, so if this behavior continues, Ubuntu will eventually die.

RE: Rik van Riel.....in regards to the split in the Redhat distro.

The Observer (I wish he could use his real name) has made the apologetics against Rik van Riel.And Yet, I agree with you Rik..well..not so much of an agreement as it is facts that you have spoken.
However, The "Observer" has also stated a fact. The question is- why didn't Redhat do something like what ubuntu did? In what could have possibly been Redhat Linux X., they could have maintained a Long term support release(LTS)?

This, again ,rick is debatebly..what isnt debatebly is the effect it had on prior users of RHL9.
I am speaking to a social and psychological issue not the technical. I may even dare to say an issue of mistrust.

The day ubuntu/mark makes the decision to do a similar fork ... one in which two brands and two communities are formed..ubuntu will pay the same price redhat did: the creation of a catalyst for mistrust (Ironically Suse/Novell just did that)

I would love to suffer from mr ellison's brand of foot in mouth disease. that's the one where you say outrageous things and get outrageously rich in the process, right?

If you want the Red Hat Enterprise support you pay the price. If not -- there's the clones like Whitebox Linux, CentOS etc. They are cloned from the RedHat sources and patches and are true work-alikes. How can RHEL be "closed" if the
sources can be downloaded, compiled and used without RedHat's corporate permission.

I've looked at doing a rebuild of RHEL for i586 for my own use so I could use it on some AMD K6 boxes. If I could put in my own graphics I could rebuild and rebrand and sell a K6 RH clone.

Mark Shuttleworth is doing a big PR push for Ubuntu. It's a nice distribution -- but for commercial stuff I'll stay with RedHat -- mostly for it's ease of Kickstart and it's automated hands-off network installation. It's only competition in that area is Solaris and Jumpstart.

At my old job we used the free stuff internally, since work couldn't afford to pay to have support on 50 development boxes in house. We looked for options beyond RH9 when RedHat made the decision to drop the commercial desktop version. We found a way to continue... RedHat's model is slightly strange for software developers and non-big MIS shops.

Even Sun didn't make us take out support contracts to legally use and develop on Solaris.

The option is there to reproduce problems seen on CentOS or Whitebox on licensed RHEL if you think there's an OS/Distribution bug from RedHat.

RHEL was pretty stable.

I'm posting from Ubuntu Edgy Eft right now... but my other box I work on here's CentOS4 for RHEL compatibility and I'm also putting up OpenSuse.

I think the Anaconda installer has put RH way in front with easy automated PXE network installation.

To: Mark,

Were it not for RedHat actually paying some major league developers on their payroll for years, with the money that came in from the support contracts, Ubunto might not even exist. Linux would remain a hacker's toy and we'll all be crying about USB being a pipe dream from the lack of development. So, let's get real. RedHat gave all of it's investments in improvements back to the community since the mid 1990's which they did freely. So, we ALL know that is the truth, plain and simple. To deny that is plainly absurd and is intellectually .. dare I say it ...ignorant, or is at best self-serving in the Extreme. It plainly insults my, and other's who have been around a while, intelligence. Don't do that, as I will not trust anything else you have to say. Neither will others, with at least one foot in reality, as to the history of the growth cycles of Linux. There are those of us that have been around before RedHat started up in Bob Young's living room. Best learn the history before you toss rocks, lest your incredible ignorance be revealed in front of a pretty tough crowd. The end-result might not be pretty. Other 'brash' startups have tried this tactic with a bunch of press, got body-slammed and dismissed into oblivion for it. One of the basic rules of Marketing 101 is to not openly attack your competitor. You just come off looking small. Ric

"Enterprise" Linux? Is this a fork? Mark is absolutely right. The author doesn't 'get' Linux.

As soon as you have to add the "enterprise" modifier to Linux, you have lost the path. Linux is an OS. Not an "Enterprise" OS, or a "Desktop" OS or any other adjective you want to throw in. Just an OS. It's supposed to be free, flexible, powerful and highly customisable to user requirements.

Redhat forgets about flexible and highly customisable. Non standard directory hierarchies and custom patched kernels limit usability of Redhat packages to Redhat only. They are intentionally non user friendly, simply to assure that service contracts are needed. Note that this is not a rant against Redhat. As long as they comply with the GPL they are absolutely free to do what they are doing. But GPL compliance does not mean they cannot be proprietary. Lock-in tactics are lock-in tactics, regardless of who is using them.

The great thing about Linux is the Utopian community and it's accomplishments which were build on the belief in free software.

I found "freedom" to be the essence of Linux.

Indeed it feels like turning to the dark side by charging for Linux or closing source. Once you've done this you're no longer a "Linux enthusiast", because that is what Linux is all about.

RH is also free to enter the business world, why not, but should be aware that is thus exiting the Linux world and personally I can only see Fedora evolving IN Linux community and essence by completely separating from RH.

For professional enthusiasts there's Apple for you, yes being a pro costs, but this "fairy land" IS Linux and this is actually it's point of start and actual value in the (real) world.

If great solutions, like Xara Xtreme, could be shared in this believe, then you see: it's actually real, it's no fairy land. Linux is not about the money, Linux is about the people. I appreciate Ubuntu for this and agree in it's positive evolution which even if it will be diminished by influence (which would be a peaty and actually pretty much evil), it's current perspective is the Linux perspective.

Maybe the Ubuntu representer went over the edge by actually making such statement, but I guess the subject needed to come up somehow, obviously the Linux community has something to say about this.

'The day ubuntu/mark makes the decision to do a similar fork ... one in which two brands and two communities are formed..ubuntu will pay the same price redhat did: the creation of a catalyst for mistrust (Ironically Suse/Novell just did that)'

I don't see where Novell has created two brands for one product. OpenSuSE is the foundation for both SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server. SuSE Enterpriser Server server is the OS running the Open Enterprise Server Offering. The OS codebase for all is the OpenSuSE distro. Difference is just the package selection and (enterprise) support.

If you reffer, in Novell's case, to the MS agreements; well, in the end Mark also has to work together with other companies to get things done. Speading FUDD is not getting Ubuntu where he likes to see it. Both Red Hat and Novell do A LOT of upstream development in several key opensource projects (Kernel, Gnome, XGL/AIGLX, OpenOffice to name a few) to help Linux futher. Comparing Canonical's upstream dev near's zero (as Jono Bacon stated on Lugradio). Novell is paving a path for companies to be able to move from Windows to Linux WITHOUD worries and technical problems. Enterprises just can't make a switch in one day from a Windows to a Linux desktop so that creates a need for interoperability at several levels, technical and political.

Regarding the patent protection part of the agreement, if MS REALLY thinks others make use of MS intellectual properties they would already have sued a large Linux (using) company like Red Hat. MS just tries to scare you. Novell's smiling behind the scenes since the agreement makes businesses move to Linux with MS support... and once they have tasted Linux..... well they might drop MS in the end.

So, in my opinion Mark better could try to explain company's why they should switch from Windows to Linux instead of over and over speading FUDD around other Linux distro's. And not only him, also others of Canonical spead crap around the business model of Novell and Red Hat. Get the feeling Canonical tries to imitate the MS marketing model... is that really the only way they think Ubuntu can grow... but in the end even Canonical has to make money.

"Regarding the patent protection part of the agreement, if MS REALLY thinks others make use of MS intellectual properties they would already have sued a large Linux (using) company like Red Hat. MS just tries to scare you. Novell's smiling behind the scenes since the agreement makes businesses move to Linux with MS support..."

Sebastian Veld,I was anticipating an argument like yours. And yes I was referring to the latter (the deal with MS).

You may be be right in the above statement, my only alteration of the statement, would come at the end:

"Novell's smiling behind the scenes since the agreement makes businesses move to Novell"

or atleast so Novell would hope...Your logic on the reason why MS have not gone after companies like RedHat may also be valid...And Yet, by that same logic Novell may be dwelling in false hope.

The fact is Novell has made, what would seem to be, a strategic move...a good business decision.
(They have been making such decisions sin 1979)

The problem is linux/open source is an organic system and are defined by Social and economic systems.

1.Economics: (from the business)
-"How can I lower my costs
(with the best cost/benefit factor)?"
-"Why pay for something thats free?"

2.Society: (open source contributor/Hacker)
-"Which community stands to gain the most from
my contributions"
-"Which community supports my ideologies more
closely?"
-"Which community do I stand gain the most
respect?"
-"How can I burn the cathedrals with the power
of the bazzar"

Mark is not incorrect,

Matter of fact Mark is so right that I am actually using Ubuntu to teach computer literacy classes and web designing and anyone is welcomed for me to send them pics if you email me. Software should be free and if it does need some work on it I am willing to help and make it better in anyway I can. oh by the way my email is Itcharlie@gmail.com