On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 17:42, Tim Kossack wrote: > Am Do, den 05.02.2004 schrieb Robert Marcano um 20:20: <snip....> > > > > I feel that the RedHat products are based on "polished" GNOME desktops. > > Maybe you are talking about proprietary MP3 plugins, proprietary media > > players, proprietary windows emulation layers, etc. that the other > > companies includes in their offerings, in my opinion that doesn't make a > > "polished" OSS based desktop, it makes a proprietary OS, something that > > I am trying to avoid ;-) > > i don't just mean plug-ins, but also the general effort red hat puts > into their desktop (as well as server) offering(s) compared to the > competition trying to make the life of the user and the admin easier. > you can of course rest on the idealistic standpoint, that > non-oss/proprietary are per se evil, but let's face it I don't think that proprietary software is pure evil, where I work we use proprietary software without any ideological conflict, for example IBM DB2, because they provide what OSS does not provides (yet), I think that less than 2 percent of our users need flash, an mp3 player, video player, neither internet access to do their daily work. This 2% can use the distro that suits their need, or a Mac, or Windows (why not) > - there are > certain standards which you have to take into account, and without java, > flash, mp3, video etc. i consider even an os for the corporate desktop > not up to the task. companies are after a fully-featured replacement for > windows which includes all these things or at least makes it easy to get > them from a user's perspective. as far as any linux-distro shipping > without those, that's certainly not the case. that's why suse, sun, > lindows are shipping their desktop offerings with at least part of this > stuff already included (if red hat prof. ws includes these things, i > stand partly corrected). > to sum it up - red hat's current desktop offerings are basically their > enterprise server putted in a differently labeled box, and i wouldn't > exactly call that a viable desktop (strategy). One of the things that i like about the existence of many different Linux distros is that i can choose the distro that meet my expectations, I personally don't want all the Linux distributions transformed on multipurpose desktop environments. I think that RedHat desktop solutions are targeting the IT professional (you can see their offer of discounted training at http://www.redhat.com/mktg/rhpw/ : "$250 off Red Hat training coupon") and Enterprise systems, that is what i want and need (and I'm not alone), people that don't match this criteria, must use the distro that really makes sense to use, call it Lindows, Gentoo, Mandrake, etc. > i'm not bashing, but simply stating the facts. with the competiton being > ahead in that respect, let's see what happens... Maybe they are ahead for personal use, and it is fine to me because I am from an old school that says that specialization is the best thing that can happen to any hardware or software product, for example, I don't see Sony selling Big x86 servers and people telling them that they are leaving an important market because they are only selling personal computers Just my opinion ;-) Robert Marcano
