Sun's reasoning is wrong.
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| Author | Content |
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| r_a_trip Aug 09, 2004 1:53 AM EDT |
The article makes a point, but its based on wrong assumptions. The problem here is not the many Distributions. Neither is it Redhat's pricing structure. The problem here is that the assumption is made that all GNU/Linux distributions are enterprise grade. This is not the case. In the Western marketspace there are two, maybe three distro's that can be qualified enterprise grade, namely Redhat, SUSE, Mandrake (they are improving a lot in this arena lately). SUSE's statement a while back there was a market for two distro's wasn't al that weird, if one amends that to mean enterprise market. At the time there were only two that met the criteria.` It's also wrong to blame incompatibilities on the number of distro's. It's the application vendors and to a lesser degree some distibutions that don't write to the LSB. LSB certified distro's and applications should work together. The problem here is that commercial application vendors have gotten used to writing to one platform only. So they write only to Redhat with Redhat specific dependancies. Instead they should have written to the LSB. The too many GNU/Linux distributions to support is a fairytale. Look at all the commercial Certified UNIX flavors. For instance, did Oracle ever say they wouldn't support Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, True64? They even support OpenVMS. Oracle supports Redhat, Novell/SUSE and United Linux. Does an enterprise need more? I can see why Sun makes the argument that they are not different from Redhat in pricing and support. That is the one thing they have in common. What Redhat doesn't have and Sun does are the complete rights to their operating system. Sun can put pressure on it's customers with Solaris, for they are the only vendor. Redhat could try, but Novell/SUSE would be very willing to migrate them over to the similar SUSE Linux Enterprise platform... |
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