[Pc_Support] Novell, Red Hat and Sun, it's like Microsoft, IBM and Apple all over again ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Right now the Linux world is filled with a number of people who dislike
Red Hat.  One trip to Red Hat would tell a completely different story,
but because people are not interested in how Red Hat really operates, so
it's easy to make their assumptions.  Ironically enough, it's not just
people who believe this, but companies too.  And what I'm starting to
see is a repeat of history of the original PC revolution.

If Apple is the innovator in the PC world, then Sun has been the
innovator in the Internet world.  There are all sorts of comparisons we
can make here, but it's really the business models that set everyone
apart.

Red Hat, like IBM, has always been, and will always be, a services
company.  Their purchase of Cygnus, the original commercial GPL success
story, bloated their company 3x, and gave them cornerstone control on
major Freedomware projects.  True to its continuing roots, Red Hat
refuses to produce software that is anything but GPL, and has only
changed due to market conditions introduced by other companies (as we'll
see).

Because of their commonality around GNU and similarity in customers, Sun
considers Red Hat it's biggest competitor.  It is a parallel to Apple
and IBM who competed in the product space a decade ago.  Red Hat and Sun
continue to "duke it out" for both servers and services, as Red Hat is
the staple of the GNU platform while Sun still sells a scalable set of
Internet infrastructure around hardware offerings.  It is almost a
mirror of IBM and Apple.

Sun has repeatedly forced Red Hat's hand on things.  After
redistributing modified versions of Red Hat Linux with all Red Hat
trademarks intact, largely coming after their Cobalt and other
acquisitions, instead of licensing, Sun turned to the USPTO to declare
Red Hat(R) public domain.  All they did was rally more people to Red
Hat's cause, even if the majority of people didn't see it.

Sun then made an even worse mistake.  Thinking they'd find a savior in
SuSE (now Novell), they made it no easier to license and partner than
Red Hat did.  Although this seemed harmless at first, Novell's purchase
has changed everything.  Because unlike Red Hat and SuSE before Novell,
Novell _does_ understand the distribution channel.

Like IBM before it, Red Hat is not focused on distribution.  It is
focused on services.  Red Hat wants to partner with developers in the
new Linux model, much like IBM with businesses under the old commercial
model.  Red Hat is regularly criticized for its lack of understanding
the distribution model.  Most infamous was their idea to introduce
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on their single, community Linux
product, Red Hat Linux 6.2 "Enterprise."

SuSE changed all that with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SuSE) v7.  It
outsold RHL 6.2E handily.  Red Hat was smart enough to recognize this
and followed suit with its own Red Hat Linux 7-based "Enterprise"
version.  But unlike SuSE, Red Hat returned to its roots and opened up
the model on the community end.  Offering a 1-2 services-community
punch, all still 100% modeled around GPL and not just the OS itself.
Eventually Red Hat overtook the sales of SuSE, although not before Sun's
USPTO gambit caused Red Hat to have to change the name on the community
version and force a lot of bad press.

Which to the masses, makes Sun's partnership with Novell seem "less
evil" than partnering with Red Hat -- even though Red Hat's continued
GNU history is undebatable.  It is a market that can't recognize the
duality of Fedora Core-RHEL, just like they couldn't between RHL-RHEL
prior.   Which is why and how companies like SuSE could sell a product
that is merely the same thing, plus an SLA, because the market is still
used to trusting "products" and "brand names" and not technologies on
their own.

And now that SuSE is Novell, a company that _does_ understand the
distribution channel and _does_ sell directory, services and other of
its own offerings atop of Linux, Sun should be concerned.  Especially as
it entrenches its own works based on Novell licenses, based on Novell
access to Sun IP, based on the alignments between the two lines.

But it won't.  It still sees Red Hat as its competitor.  And it plays to
the fact that many people don't see Red Hat for the GNU leader it really
is, and the services company it has limited itself too.  It doesn't
realize that Novell it is most direct threat in the distribution
channel, with a control over some of Sun's fate now.  A company that has
its own, existing partnerships, it's own, powerful resources at OEMs and
even its own Java replacement.

10 years from now, we'll be talking about how Sun got swindled out of
its marketshare by Novell.  And how Red Hat really made the Linux
industry and that's why they are still a major presence, because they
still drive a lot of the GNU development and innovation.  Hindsight is
easy.  Foresight is everything.

Novell is in a prime striking position, and they will wait and wait
until Sun is entrenched before taking advantage of it.  Until then, Sun
will still believe Red Hat is their enemy, just like Apple thought of
IBM before.  But it's really Novell that is poised to control the
distribution channel, just like Microsoft before.  All the meanwhile,
Novell knows to work with Red Hat, just like Microsoft recognized why
they did with IBM too.

And history repeats itself.  People call me a Red Hat apologist.  I'm
not.  I'm just a business realist.  Red Hat doesn't want complete
control of the distribution channel, and they are more than happy to
stick with their stewardship as the prime leaders of major GNU projects
while making a healthy profit in services and enterprise support.  The
real fun is beginning now between Novell and Sun, and I see Novell in a
position to really dominate Sun -- almost a facimile of Microsoft and
Apple market positioning before.

Especially as people think Novell has no position in Linux, just like
they though Microsoft had no control over the PC.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                  b.j.smith at ieee.org 
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Community software is all about choice, choice of technology.
Unfortunately, too many Linux advocates port over the so-called
"choice" from the commercial software world, brand name marketing.
The result is false assumptions, failure to focus on the real
technical similarities of implementations and blind alignments.