This was never finished until June of 2021… was written around Christmas time (last draft on December 21st), then I got COVID and ran 10 days behind and whole slew of backlogs in life…
In the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM recently, they didn’t really wait to cut off community support for their free and open source operating systems.
Red Hat, is one of the largest mass producers of commercial Linux operating systems. Their flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is sold to either enterprises or other corporations who will then resell the operating system as part of their own software (think of Cisco’s Communications Manager, or Avaya’s older AUDIX software.) There was two offsprings to a free but non commercial, non critical or be able to profit off their own code. There were two versions outside of Red Hat they had targeted, Fedora for desktops, and Centos (as in Community Enterprise Operating System) for enterprises and desktops.
One of the reasons why Linux or open source was better than commercial software was their alleged lifespan. End of life cycles were very long. Now what would be the last final support to Centos is now going to be within the next year, as opposed to 2028, in the old arraingment.
The issues of Linux as a desktop or a more mainstream server systems was the lack of unity. In a Live Free or Die technical state, there is a lot of us-vs-them from within the non-comm coders world. Think of KDE vs. GNOME; Mandrake vs Knopix, CENTOS vs. Debian, etc.
Like in the real commercial world, there is a lifecycle of a release. And given how insecure UNIX can be to run scripts, it’s not OK in their world to run vintage versions of Linux in production, or even in an isolated LAN. The selling point of Linux for vintage was for the hardware it could theoretically run, where commercial systems wouldn’t support 3 to 5 year old hardware.
The other issues I’ve spoken in the past is the lack of empathy of the overall user from the open source world. A lot of software packages are half-rate from the commercial world because it literally what most users want. Coders, like rapists think they are above all rules and they think if they know what’s best, then you are not to question them, and if you do you’ll be belittled and verbally abused.
While the so-called end user experience differs between the “distros”, Linux’s big failure is the ability to settle on one platform and stick with it with the hopes the group-think of Free and Open Source Software.
For some of my experiences with Linux, I preferred CENTOS over the other distros. The way IBM bought a big software company and is using their revenue to pay off debt that has nothing to do with Red Hat, that goes back decades. This lack of financial literacy of techies, leads them to think IBM is the worst “companies” (techies poor English trying to elaborate “Corporate America”) to exist. The problem is most Linux and FOSS people live off something or someone else and expect to have a free lunch, and someone has to feed their family. Now I am not sounding like Microsoft, M$ies, tend to say “we put a lot of hard work of blood sweat and tears [shoplifting others codes like DOS, the Macintosh, VMS etc.] creating DOS, and Windows and Windows NT”.
Corporations that are to provide a service (that is an easy to distribute version of Linux) has to pay debt, and other costs other than just people. They have to break even. Red Hat was fine, but IBM wanted to make quick buck to pay off debt from other failed acquisitions or financing bleeding entities, that techies think is perfectly OK.
Why should the mainframe business have x amount of employees at a declining y revenue stream? That is not how a capitalistic system is support to work. Notice I refrained from stating capitalism which are two different meanings.
This is what people sign up to live. On the edge, unsure what the next sustainable path both financially and technologically. This is one of the reasons why I checked out of high tech.