Red Hat says it has no plans for a consumer Linux product
By Nilay Patel 
posted Apr 18th 2008 3:32AM
posted Apr 18th 2008 3:32AM
We've never really thought of Red Hat as being a consumer-focused Linux provider, and it looks like the company is content to stay in the enterprise -- the company announced today that it has no plans to enter the consumer space. Red Hat says that as a for-profit public company, the focus on the bottom line precludes a risky bet on a consumer-oriented Linux desktop, and that it sees history as being "littered" with failures. Instead, the company is going to work on getting businesses to switch over to managed Linux desktops, which seems like a safe, if somewhat dull strategy. Still, that's a pretty big potential market to give up, especially as more and more UMPCs and MIDs hit the scene with Linux pre-loaded, and distros like gOS and Ubuntu (seven days till Hardy Heron, kids!) increase consumer awareness. Still, we can sort of see why Red Hat is willing to safely make money in the corporate game -- but we prefer our Linux a little more punk rock.[Via Mobile Tech Today]
Redhat 5.2 was my first Linux system. It was tough getting it to work on my old (new at the time) Toshiba laptop but I learned so much in the process. I moved on to Mandrake which was much more consumer friendly but I still thank Redhat for introducing me to Linux.
My first distro was Slackware, not sure what version -- this was in the a.out days before the binary format was switched to ELF. The best part about it was how it, by default, broke your lilo.conf on install. So any new Slackware system you installed immediately failed to boot and you had to use a rescue disk to clean it up.
That was always a fun memory each time over the next 5 or so years that I did a reinstall (maybe 1-2 more times) where I'd wonder why the hell it didn't boot a fresh install, then it slowly came back to me and made me think "why the hell haven't they fixed this yet??"
See but slackware is SUPPOSED to be that way, that's how you know its H4RDC0RE!!1!!11111!!!!!!!!! Seriously though, I can sympathize, as a slackware user I am glad they cleaned up that very annoying issue.
Well wasn't it clear that distros would settle down to what they're best at someday?
Doesn't come as a surprise to me... they would certainly have to spend a lot of cash just to get near the public hype Ubuntu currently has. That money is better spent fortifying their position in the B2B-Market.
Hmm...let's see....
Stay in B2B where margins are wide, competition is slim, and you're widely recognized as the only real, viable option for enterprise Linux
or
Try to enter the Consumer market, where your margins will be ground to dust by competitors and people who couldn't tell bash from an email clogging the support lines asking why it won't play their iTunes files.
No, I think it'd be foolish for them to expand into Consumer products.
I think that's why they dropped their free/cheap systems to begin with. They know their place and they choose to focus on it. It's just good business sense.
SELLING Linux??
Seriously... Shows what a scam all this open source BS is.
I suppose it's fair to assume you're not a Linux user?
Get your facts right...
Enterprise Edition was sold for an exorbitant sum a few years ago.
So what? They sell systems and support. That's what you pay for.
you can sell linux, its perfectly legal under the GNU user agreement, goto ebay and youll find tons of ubuntu discs
linux is meant to be free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer, so they can seel it but they just have release their source code
and HARDY HERON FTW
The GPL allows you to sell anything so long as you provide the source code of what you borrowed with it, and so that they can modify it and potentially do stuff with it themselves; the LGPL does not require you to include the source code with your product.
So, GPL allow to sell the work of thousand of (free laborer) *ahem* collaborators.
What everyone is also missing here is that there's already a desktop distribution of RHL, it's called fedora. Creating a redundant distro with the intention of padding the bottom line seems a lot stupid when fedora is free and has very similar functionality.
Yes, you are correct. But they didn't always have Fedora. RedHat used to have their free version available on their site. Fedora is as I understand it a separate release based on RedHat. The end result is the same, but I believe there's no affiliation.
Redhat is not the only version to do this, I use to use SuSE exclusively until they were bought out. Now they do the same thing, SuSE is their enterprise product, but they spun off OpenSuSE for the general public.
I think it is these companies attempt, especially RedHat, to keep these product lines seperate. I don't think it is a bad thing or a good thing, at least they have a free version.
Personally, I use gentoo and sometimes debian.
i'm going to install the new Ubuntu on my mac when it's released... i've NEVER used a linux distro before... what should i expect?
and Engadget, you're links to gOS and Ubuntu in this article start with "chrome://"... engadget == fail
I have been using Ubuntu for 18 months and it has been stable, reliable, efficient and hassle-free. It's what using a computer should be. My printer, scanner, wifi, camera, camcorder, ipod all works. I have it installed on a permanently attached USB hard drive, so when I switch on the computer I just choose Windows XP or Ubuntu. When I first started, I used to use WinXP more, but now I almost exclusively use Ubuntu. I only use WinXP to update virus S/W, microsoft updates, and iTunes (i like iTunes ).
Waiting for Ubuntu 8.04 next week. Hardware compatibilty is the main problem area. Try the LiveCD. Give it a go. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. If you have problems visit the Ubuntu Forum. Enjoy!
ive bounced around between distros and xp for a while and even vista to a lesser extent but i had one period it was linux only for 13 months and now ive been on linux only for 5 months, ubuntu is by far my distro of choice, but fedora openSUSE pclinuxos and linux mint have been very good to me. somethings dont work off the bat but pretty much every problem ive had has been settled on the ubuntu forums/other linux sites, or by a simple upgrade. the only real problem is the lack of gaming support but wine is come so far in the past few months to a year that alot of my favorite games work perfectly now ((mvp baseball2005, nhl07, morrowind, oblivion, and civilization3)) i really dont have a need for windows now. linux is a great thing just for the lack of virii and malware ((not total lack but it gets updated regularly so that gets rid of most threats)) id have to say download and ubuntu disc and play around with it on the livedisc function ((using it with out installing, great feature btw)) and see what you like
Why do you want to install Linux on your Mac?
Don't get me wrong, using Linux is way more pleasant in many ways than using Windows, but I just don't see the advantages over OS X for the consumer. I stopped running desktop Linux when my first Mac in '02 relegated the desktop machine to fileserver status.. then once laptop hard drives got big enough I ditched the fileserver altogether.
The only really compelling reason I could see is that you need to do some programming in Linux, but if you're using PPC Linux, you're going to have issues developing for the larger x86 Linux community.
OS X already has most of the tools you could ever want in Linux, either installed by default, or via Fink and by installing the X11 package.
i've been using mac since the 90s... and i'm planning on installing it mostly for curiosity, since i've never used a linux distro before... OS X is certainly going to be my primary OS... but who knows, maybe all that will change in 10 years.
Okay seems like a fair answer :) I hated Macs until OS X, and used Linux before then, so I'm kind of on the opposite track.. glad to see something with the advantages of a commercial OS, with none of the myriad Windows failures.
Of course it only makes sense that if you have Macs only, that's what you'd install Linux on :) Otherwise I'd say it makes more sense to put it on a cheap PC.
Is this really news? Didn't they do this years ago? RH9 was the last 'consumer' release. That was what, like 4 years ago? Then they put out RHEL for a fee and pawned off their beta testing (Fedora) for RHEL on the 'consumers'. What am I missing?
People were curious because of all the Ultra Portables with Linux distros pre-installed if they would join the fun. And you are very right, after the spin off of Fedora Core, Red Hat has strickly been a commercial company product. In the end, this was just to answer a few people's questions.
KUBUNTU!
If you prefer your "Linux a little more punk rock", you should see if you can get your hands on a copy of BSDeviant. It was a Free BSD based Live CD small enough o fit on a mini CD. It was developed by the (now defunct) UnixPunx.org crew. About as punk rock as it got.
Ahhh nostalgia.
Yes, Fedora in a roundabout way, is Red Hat's free offering. Though it is technically owned by The Fedora Project, it is based on Red Hat code. In a nutshell, Fedora is Red Hat's test bed for bleeding-edge software. Typically, before a feature/software is added to the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) lineup, it is extensively 'tested out' in Fedora. Once it's deemed safe and stable enough for commercial use, said feature/application then finds its way into RHEL.
At least, that's how it was explained to me by the instructor in the RHCT certification course (at Red Hat headquarters, no less).
Truthfully that is something of a miss conception. Yes, RH does have a habbit of using Fedora as a testting grounds. But this is indeed has it limits, there are many things in Fedora that may simply have no hope of finding itself in RHEL (The clones as EPEL has been proving, is a different matter)... Mind you, I have been using Fedora/Fedora Core since 2 and yes it's best described as the running beta. At this time, Fedora 8/9 there has been more effort to polish the distro into something of it's own so if anything, it's its own running Beta... for now.
This is a breath of fresh air in the Linux community, consumer level Linux systems are not at all lucrative, and at least Red Hat realizes this.
There was Red Hat Linux, which was sort of available to the general public, but now one could argue that Fedora is their consumer Linux. Technically, Fedora is a separate project, but they use Red Hat's source code and they sponsor it.
The world is still in search of a Linux standard. This would be a Linux version that is NOT a version that is always in beta mode, changes every year, and who's current version is not supported for more than a year. The Linux standard would be a version that has commercial penetration AND consumer penetration.
RHEL could be that version. All Red Hat has to do is offer (for $40) a year, rights for updates from Red Hat Network with NO support (which would not financially burden the company). What you would get would be a version of Linux supported commercially, not in beta, and that does not constantly change. Red Hat simply needs to simplify their obtuse support web site - they should have an easily navigatable single page which provides online kernel and application updates, news, and virus protection. Then RHEL could easily be the Linux standard the world is still waiting for.