May 2007 Archives
Lumbering into the large, slightly faded ballroom of The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a crowd of mid-level and upper-level IT managers gathered to listen to the morning Open Source Business Conference keynote from Red Hat CEO and President Matt Szulik.
This is an interesting conference in the Linux and open source conference lineup: it's official goal is getting attendees to realize how open source can practically fit within their companies. Unofficially, it's about getting vendors and customers together. Yes, the topic is technology, but this is a business conference, no bones about it.
On the Internet, they say, no one knows you're a dog. After the start of this week, I can safely add, no one knows you are sick as a dog, either.
Such was the fun going on in the global headquarters of Linux Today for the first half of this week, as your editor fought off a case of the flu to keep LT up and running... and nothing more. Being sick is never fun, but it was especially frustrating this week, because Microsoft opened its corporate big mouth again and I had some things to say in response.
Since I am feeling much better now, I'm going to take a stab at why Microsoft is trying such a strange tactic.
In my previous blog entry named "Community vs. Enterprise" I wrote about the problem of being able to have a stable (I mean really stable) versions of some distributions like OpenSUSE and Fedora (well, you have have those but they'll be called SLES and RHEL and will cost you some money), and to me it looked like OpenVZ was the only exclusion from that rule.
I have to admit I was blind (or perhaps just somewhat RPM-centric) -- both Debian and Ubuntu have both bleeding edge and rock stable versions of their distros without any price tag attached. I thank the commenters who pointed me to that, and I'm happy that OpenVZ is in a good company here doing good stuff. ;)
Red Hat psyched out the press corps a bit, delaying questions about their online desktop strategy until a second press conference at noon, local time. There, we thought we would get the skinny on this new "online desktop" model.
Would that this were true.
Capitalizing on a pre-existing channel in developing nations, Red Hat instead announced their new Global Desktop program, geared to deploy on Intel's Classmate, Affordable, Community, and Low-Cost PC product line.
You have to wonder what the heck Red Hat is thinking when CTO and VP of Engineering Brian Stevens says to the keynote attendees "we believe the desktop paradigm is dead."
Stevens made that public statement in response to a question from eWeek's Peter Galli, who must have tracked Stevens down as the reception last night after I ran into Galli as I was leaving the reception. Peter's a good journalist, and asked a good question: "when is Red Hat going to move to the desktop?"