Open-source Linux doesn't pay, said no one ever at Red Hat Red Hat's sales jumped 14 per cent, year-on-year, in the quarter that ended May 31, thanks to contracts with government and cloud providers. The GNU/Linux distro maker recorded US$481m in sales in its first quarter of its fiscal 2016 year, and a net income of US$48m, up 26 per cent on the year-ago period. The 44 cents per …
Are you kidding its becoming Windows. Still Red Hat should give Poettering all kinds of stock options. Even Microsoft wasn't able to cash in on others work as well. It does take some serious weaselling to get so much open source code locked in to the one platform you make money on that is supposed to be nearly POSIX.
Gnome for example is two years tops away from being unportable.
Well, no loss there then. They are seriously screwing up Gnome, and Nautilus is now useless as a file manager. Amongst other things, apparently they've decided that no one should ever need to know the time stamp of a file more than 24hrs in the past. They're rapidly coding their way towards irrelevance, whilst everyone else (esp Cinnamon) just gets better and better.
I have a thesis that's possibly worth exploring. Inside Redhat there are a bunch of programmers working on Gnome, and they've run out of ideas. If they stop doing stuff they'll get fired. So they make it up, say that everyone else is an idiot when the latest release is derided and hope that their boss never realises that he's been had.
I can see where this is going.
I don't think RH make their money from the desktop though.
I'd hazard a guess that it is mostly support for systems running apache and oracle for companies where such systems handle a lot of revenue.
The year of the Linux Desktop is not here yet. We need to wait for Snow Leopard users' systems to die and be forced to look at the abomination of Yosemite and Windows 10. They will choose the one true KDE Way ;)
We also need a time-machine equivalent to be shipped as standard in a visible way, not be some add-on.
> Dolphin's a bit heavy for a file manager
I guess it depends on your use case. For me, being able to access my web servers and remote computers (via sftp), phone (KDE Connect), ownCloud servers (WEBDAV), etc., all transparently and from a unified interface is quite an advantage, since all the previously mentioned actions are part and parcel of my daily workflow.
Horses for courses, etc.
>They're rapidly coding their way towards irrelevance, whilst everyone else (esp Cinnamon) just gets better and better.
Its good Cinnamon has moved more and more away from Gnome but it may well get caught up in the systemd dependency hell as well. Clem is a great dev/guy but has accepted the RH take over too readily IMHO.
>You know if you took time to learn systemd
Systemd is not hard and I do have to use it at work along with Windows and luckily other much better OSs. Why because I am paid to do so and accept it as part of the job. Doesn't mean I have to put up with it on my own time which I don't. Both UNIX and Open Source is so much more than Linux regardless of what Red Hat thinks or tries to do. The fork will live.
As I see it, the good of systemd is that I can reboot in a small number of seconds, and the bad is that I seem to have to do it at least ten times as often, for something like a wash, except that I need to learn a new way to do things that were quite straightforward with the sysv bucket of mostly fairly simple shell scripts.
"As I see it, the good of systemd is that I can reboot in a small number of seconds, and the bad is that I seem to have to do it at least ten times as often, for something like a wash"
Using OpenSUSE I reboot hardly ever and only switch off when I'm traveling. Updates arrive regularly and systemd seems to restart any daemons that have been updated.
"Are you kidding its becoming Windows. Still Red Hat should give Poettering all kinds of stock options. Even Microsoft wasn't able to cash in on others work as well."
All the code is GPL licenced I believe. So the system can evolve into something a bit saner over time. Some of the *bsd people are hoping to build their own launchd so having a *thing* that lives between the kernel and the applications seems to be a popular development.
Free != Free as in beer.
There is nothing preventing people from selling GPL software as long as you abide by the GPL and make the code available to those you distribute to. Over the years I've bought quite a number of linux distos and it was quite common before fast internet connections were widely available to be able to buy copies of various GPL'd software.
"If redhat is gpl then why can't I download or obtain it for free? or am I missing something here."
You can download (and redistribute it!) for free - after You buy it. GPL does not mean "free as in beer". RedHat has every right to sell its Distro to You.
Under the GPL they have to give you the source code too, an You are free (as in freedom) to pass forward both the source and the binaries.
Intellectual property, trademark and so on, are not part of this.
By the same token, RedHat has no obligation whatsoever to keep publishing corrections to its Distro (barring maintenance contracts). They charge You for the privilege of downloading the upgrades - and these upgrades are under the GPL too.
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