[NCLUG] a rather different view of the rh thing (a bit about sooze also)

jbass at dmsd.com jbass at dmsd.com
Mon Nov 10 11:25:50 MST 2003


Daniel Miles <milesd at cs.colostate.edu> writes:
> For those of us who are a little out of the loop, could you maybe
> provide a little description of what you mean when you say "red hat is
> moving away from the desktop?"
>
> Sorry, I'm just so curious I had to ask.

There are several ways to read between the lines here, some view it as
Redhat pulling out of the desktop, which is false as far as I can tell,
as they plan to keep a DeskTop product for some time to come.

The breakneck 6 month release cycles are HORRIBLE, and prevent a shrinkwrap
software market. A large part of the development Linux community expects
this, and accepts being on the leading edge. That function is being handed
over to the Fedora project. It's still not clear to me if they might not
release the next desktop which has been cycled several times as the beta
severn this summer and fall.

The Advanced Server product, which many run know as AS2.1 was a deliberate
choice to slow the release cycles so that platform interface and support
stability was managable ... and RedHat could put serious value added into
and pull a revenue stream from, since it wasn't expected to be free on
the web site.

For those who have not been watching the RedHat betas, there has been a
split in the AS beta, which now includes the WS Workstation, or DeskTop
version targeted for a different market which expects release and support
stability for more than 6 months. This appears to be the new RedHat
supported Destop, priced at about $150/seat retail, and is not likely
to be freely available on the web site.

So the strong support for Fedora, is a reasonable strategy, given the
Redhat DeskTop is very likely to soon be a closed binary with bundled
value added. If they had tried this two years ago, there would have
been a huge roar ... there still might be.

John



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