Cox Crow

Boxers or Briefs?

The Linux distributions have two support costs.

1. packaging and integration
2. help

Packaging and integration is the very foundation of a Linux distribution, assembling the disparate components of an operating system into something functional.

3:59:11 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Forcing a Decision

Red Hat has eliminated the Red Hat Linux product line, in favor of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux line. RHEL will be derived from the Fedora Project. Fedora is roughly equivalent to the previous Red Hat Linux line, but is supported differently. That is, it's not supported by Red Hat, and not certified by ISVs.

There're two motives for this move, to reduce the cost of support and to increase the number of ISVs. Both needs are met by increasing the stability of the platform. (For "increasing stability" read "decreasing the rate of change.") Fedora keeps Red Hat's hat in the ring as far as community involvement and increasing the user population goes, but does introduce an interesting quandary: What happens when a madly innovative ISV builds the Next Big Thing on a feature that is not yet available in RHEL? You wait.

The real problem with Red Hat's approach, though, is that when you force a customer to make a decision, that customer can choose to not use you. Will Big Business migrate Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or to SuSE? Will Joe Developer migrate to Debian or Gentoo? Or will they ditch Linux in toto and choose any other POSIX-compliant OS?

3:01:35 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

The Players

Novell's buying SuSE, not Caldera SCO. How about that?

11:49:35 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Is There an Assumption of Privacy in the Village Square?

Aaron Swartz noticed that Google's watching IRC networks.

Google Indexing IRC?. Tony Collen reports (confirmed by Google and others, apparently) that Google is sending robots to IRC channels (internet chat rooms) as part of some experiment. Since things said in chat rooms are traditionally considered very private, I can't imagine what they plan to do. [Google Weblog]

IRC is not private. There may be an assumption of privacy, but it's invalid. There are two things which make this assumption invalid: one, you cannot see everyone, and there's no secure method of identifying the other parties to the conversation. You could identify the other party using out-of-band methods, but you still wouldn't be able to see all the flies on the wall.

11:32:46 AM # Google It!