Happy Holiday Wishes from Vraxx

Here's to anybody that happens upon this blog, or even the occasional repeat reader of my blog, like... all 5 of you. :)

Very Merry Christmas or general Happy Holidays. Be good, be safe and be happy.

Red Hat Profits, MS gets Linux Support Customers

Recent articles in ZDNet and other trade publications have made note of three large companies now seeking support contracts under the partnership between Novell and MS. This should definitely prove interesting as thus far the immediate impact of this new business alliance has not been felt at Red Hat.

With Red Hat shares gaining considerably in year to year growth it looks like the support model they are offering is working, so far at least. Though I have been a Red Hat user for a very long time, even i agree that RHEL is less accessible to the average user. (Don't get me wrong CentOS does a good job). For me having at least one "commercial" flavor of Linux is a job requirement. I do however feel that the up and coming Linux admins of the world will be influence by their "first taste" of a distro. I still know admins today that will never leave the worlds of Slackware or FreeBSD because that's where they cut their teeth.

Do I think the new competitors to RH in the support market will make an impact? Yes, will it be as strong as they hope? We'll have to see. One thing that sets the 'support' model differences is the caliber of folks. It's easy to lump a bunch of low-paid IT folks into a room w/phones and call it a support center, but to actually keep and retain those highly skilled workers who are willing to do technical support? that's another issue entirely.

IBM's Mainframe Monopoly?

So a few posts in the ZDNet forum commented that IBM is to Mainframes as MS is to Operating Systems. I dunno that I completely agree with the assessment. I say this mainly because it wasn't always Big Blue with 90% in the mainframe market. Unisys, Hitachi, even to a lesser extent HP were all in the game, but when the hard times came, the smaller companies took their marbles and went to the smaller playground. IBM toughed it out and while it certainly lost units, it retained a good % of the mainframe market. Since the Mainframe market is one part of a larger IT infrastructure (which could and has invariably moved away from Mainframes into mostly Server and Server Clusters) I think it's harder to call their percentages monopolistic. If you take it to a broader server/mainframe view IBM is probably at a loss due to mediocre penetration in the SMB category and pressure from vendors like Dell and HP.

IBM's recent suit against PSI is specifically a patent infringement case and licensing issues. Now whether or not this is just a tactic to keep PSI tied up for years in court is conjecture. I am curious to see just how another manufacturer could break into the market. Most of the big-giants are all but cold. Truth be known I think other than NEC and Cray I don't think there's anybody else that comes to mind for mainframes.

ODSL Layoffs -- Change in the air or airing out...

The ODSL (Open Source Development Lab) which admittedly doesn't focus necessarily on raw development let go 9 full time employees and has changed their organization efforts in order to better address legal issues and drumming up more viability for Linux as a front runner OS.

I find the fact that an organization has to be setup exclusively for the legal repercussions of the FOSS model a little scary, but I understand why it must be there. Linux fans will problem claims this is part of the pressure by MS. MS fans will claim this is proof that the Linux/FOSS model of business doesn't work. I'll just hold my judgement until either a) more people leave or are dismissed from the ODSL or b) the organization folds due to the tensions caused by Novell (one of the key partners)

I so did not see that coming... (sarcasm)

OK so Novell has made it known they wish to fork Open Office (see article )with one version supporting Microsoft's proposed option to the ODF. Now this wasn't that far fetched, but I wonder how licensing for the fork will work out. With the existing code base being GPL'ed and there likely being snippets of proprietary code in the fork, just how is that going to be kosher?

Novell's moves are bold, but I think at the same time they aren't totally taking into account the zealot culture that's formed around Linux and FOSS. I'm more a moderate than anything when it comes to my support of open source, so while I get where Novell is going I think a lot of it is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many of the developer community.

We'll have to wait and see how the forking of Open Office affects the potential cohesiveness of the project and its ability to really go head to head if at all with MS Office in the future.

UPDATE: OK so a few folks viewed my view of the situation as FUD. According to posts, the OpenOffice code will not fork but the plugins to support the Microsoft Open XML format. The licensing is to be done under a BSD and LGPL so hopefully there's little concern that MS will will use any patents which contribute to the modules against other projects that utilize the source code contributed to OOo.