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Are You Locked Into Red Hat?

  September 30, 2002
  By Don MacVittie


The four founding companies of UnitedLinux would have you believe that nonmember Red Hat has designs on overrunning the enterprise -- and competitors -- with its customized distribution of the Linux operating system. We can't speak to Red Hat's intentions, but the premise of this theory is flawed, at best. If nothing else, the Linux movement should have taught us that closed, proprietary solutions are history.

Red Hat now owns the U.S. Linux server market, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, and icebergs have been known to melt. No vendor will win the Linux war unless someone makes it easy for enterprises to deliver Linux on the desktop. That's when the real support fees will start rolling in, and all the members of UnitedLinux know that. SuSE is arguably the best end-user version of Linux, and the company's business model is much more like Microsoft's than is Red Hat's.

But users that move to Linux over the next couple of years -- motivated by low cost or openness or both -- won't allow one vendor to lock them in with no viable competition. If leaving Microsoft meant locking in with another vendor, why would that customer have left in the first place?

So ignore the public rantings of Linux vendors and look around you. You can build your own Linux distribution in your basement if you like. In a world like that, Microsoft-style monopolies are impossible to maintain. Linux will have multiple flavors for many years, and all things considered, I wouldn't have it any other way.

--Don MacVittie, dmacvittie@nwc.com


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