3 ms·
The big difference, I see, between Red Hat and Sun and Novell is Red Hat is younger as a company and has less emotional baggage. They have to compete which make
by Supermighty 16y ago
The big difference, I see, between Red Hat and Sun and Novell is Red Hat is younger as a company and has less emotional baggage. They have to compete which makes them less complacent than Sun or Novell.
I see the future of open source as a service and support industry. It's working for Red Hat also companies like Wordpress.
- ams6110 16y agoSun was a hardware company. When hardware became a commodity their unique architectures could not find buyers, and there was not enough margin in x86 to sustain the company. Novell sold proprietary LAN software, and their market evaporated when Windows starting having networking built-in, while at the same time Linux made open networking standards available at no cost (for the software, at least).
- michael_dorfman 16y agoExactly. Of the three, Red Hat was the only one that was formed around open source, and the only one whose open source business model wasn't born in the desperation of a previous, successful closed source business model collapsing.
- Supermighty 16y agoSun and Novell were in the process of a pivot whereby they would have set their business model around open source. They just didn't do it well enough.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoHas anyone successfully made that particular pivot?
- chrisaycock 16y agoIBM, to some degree. They launched Global Services long before it was fashionable. Louis Gerstner explains in Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? that there was tremendous doubt in the 1990's that consulting was the way to go, but he realized early on that the world "didn't need another hard drive maker" and decided that IBM could provide value best by acting as the integrator of smaller companies' components.
- nailer 16y agoIndeed. The guys I knew at Sun who saw the light when Intel performance started killing SPARC has to fight against their own colleagues. Half of them ended up working at Red Hat.
- Supermighty 16y agoIt's terrible when your favorite toy is also the anchor weighing you down to the sea floor.
- nailer 16y agoThat's true. If Sun decided to do Linux x86 at a price point similar to Red Hat in say, 2003 I think they'd be alive now.
- chrisaycock 16y agoFrom the linked El Reg article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open... > Sun should, McNealy told us, have sold and supported Solaris on its own x86 hardware. Instead, Sun took the fatal decision of outsourcing that role: it placed its trust in OEMs such as Dell to sell and support Sun's Unix on their Intel boxes. Problem was, these were the very same OEMs who, it emerged during the US Department of Justice's (DoJ) antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, had had their arms twisted into offering only Windows with Internet Explorer on PCs or risk losing access to Windows on their machines.
- nailer 16y agoPeople don't like using Solaris. Regardless of the recent kernel innovations, the userspace - packaging, compiler toolchain, command line UI and GUI, support for modern keyboard layouts in vi - most people prefer GNU to Sun, and Sun never addressed this. Sol 10 had some great stuff in kernelspace, but a shitty userland on x86 wouldn't have solved Sun's problems.
- btilly 16y ago