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Re: Sunday, February 8, 2004
I hop on my Fedora Core 1 and open my Mozilla and up comes Slashdot with the following news??? http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/08/0348237.shtml?tid=126&tid=137&tid=163 News? I wondered. For years I've watched Oracle and Dell and IBM, and I don't know who else declare that RedHat was their default install. And I always said this would be the death of Linux. I truely hate marketing weenies for their channeling tactics! And so, I read that Dell is supporting thru a WebLog, *VARIOUS* Linux distributions which run on their Dell machines and not just REDHAT alone. No mention of Fedora here specifically, just that RedHat is their default install. Personally, I started off with Slackware, then ran RedHat for a couple of years, then used Debian, then various other distro's (133 of them seen at http://www.linux.org), and Gentoo, and now I'm using Fedora. I don't mind Fedora too much but you'll never see Oracle support anything other than Suse or RedHat and I see that as a mistake. It's just a sick mistake. This isn't 'TO BE OPEN'. I knew it wasn't 'TO BE OPEN'. I feel this event is the first to mark the swing of the big vendors into believing they are going to have to support a dozen or more distributions before we achieve the market's demands. Why they ignored the market's demands in the first place is pure arrogance on their part. By demanding a RedHat base or specifically in the case of Oracle an $1800 in price RedHat base they were making Linux appear as a marketing failure! Most managers I knew questioned paying $1800 for open source /freeware and rightly so. They just kept on buying Windows. Since the SCO incident, I've felt that all commercial interests are harmful to open source and free software in one form or another. Either their out-right suing the world over it or their acting like an anchor brake here like Oracle does. And I get real crazy here and mad just thinking about Oracle and Linux. Do they do this intentially or is their marketing board just nuts, I often wonder. Then I read about PeopleSoft and I'm back to this case by case basis in evaluating Linux partner companies. Could it be that Dell's recent 'employee sponsered' position {HAD TO THROW THAT IN}, could spell the end of further high hand marketing channeling within Linux. This kind of activity is just as damaging as a copyright or a patent.
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