Aug

3

Ubuntu not the Red Hat killer

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Tony Mobily wrote a controversial editorial for the latest Free Software Magazine, envisioning Red Hat’s demise in front of the rise of Ubuntu Linux. This is suppposed to happen because Red Hat has abandoned desktop users, who often are also systems administrators, who in turn have some say in which server OS they want to run and maintain. Given that Ubuntu now has a very nice server system to offer as well, Mobily sees Red Hat’s user base and business slipping to Ubuntu in the future.

While Ubuntu may well be “the first desktop GNU/Linux done right,” and they now have “Ubuntu Server, which—again, guess what?—is a GNU/Linux server system done right,” I don’t see Red Hat going away any time soon. It’s still the biggest enterprise Linux, and that’s exactly what Ubuntu is not and, if Ubuntu SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth’s rebuttal is to be believed (if it is, we don’t know for sure,) is not trying to produce in the near future:

My own view is that Red Hat will continue to do well in the specific areas that they have targeted – they are extremely well established in the high-availability enterprise Linux server market, and it will take some years before Ubuntu can make the same claim.

Our focus is different to that of Red Hat – we want to ensure that there are free (in both FSF and economic senses) platforms for commodity requirements, like desktops and typical web or email of HPC servers, where the existing free software stack does everything that people typically want.

There are of course the “some years” after Ubuntu may well be able to claim to be “well established in the high-availability server market” in the above quote, but personally I don’t think Ubuntu is going to eat Red Hat’s server market share very much. A well supported Debian-based server is very much needed, but I doubt this need exists so much among the current Red Hat clients.

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