Re: [tlug] RE: getting back on track [ was RE: introductions ]

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 08:04:13PM +0900, Raymond Regalado wrote:

>Would Red Hat's abandonment of the RH 7.x 8.x 9.x be a good thing for 
>TL?

If this was 3 or 4 years ago, yes, certainly.  Now, it doens't make
any difference.  TurboLinux made it big in Japan, and later Korea,
before Red Hat got here.  They were also moving into China and 
doing well.  Red Hat came along and used its superior cash reserves
and army of programmers to quickly close the ground with TurboLinux
in terms of CJK support.

Meanwhile, TL had gotten a ton of venture capital, expanded from about
10 staff members (at the time I did their website makeover in 1998)
up to nearly 100 and moved to expensive new digs in Shibuya.  That
was after moving to new but more reasonable digs near Shinjuku.  They
then (foolishly, in the opinion of just about everyone) decided they
would take their powerbase in Asia and use it to try and break into
the US market in a big way, since TurboLinux was almost unknown there,
even though it was in origin an American company.

Red Hat was by far the market leader among people who wanted a "friendly'
distro, and among those who didn't, Slackware and Debian had most of it,
as the still do now.  Mandrake and SuSe also had percentages, then as now.
If I'm leaving out any distro that had a significant percentage, my
apologies, but those were the major players.

In jumped TurboLinux.  They spent huge amounts of money and effort trying
without any great success to break into the US market.  Meanwhile, back
here in their home market, Red Hat was working very hard at trying to 
unseat them, and they succeeded.  So at the end of the day, they were
left with not much more market share in North America than they had when
they started, and far less in Japan than they had when they started.

TL soon dumped those dozens of employees, and shrunk way down.  Rumor has it
that they were then smaller than when they were in a storefront office in
Umegaoka and I was redoing their website and on the beta test team for
Turbo Linux 2.0.

They grew very quickly, got lots of VC (in retrospect, maybe more than
was good for them) and brought in a professional management team.  That
was probably really their downfall.  That team understood business well
enough, I'm sure (although I have to question why they missed the fact
that North America was a crowded and maturing Linux market and their just
wasn't room for another major distro; the major players now are the same
as they were then, and TL is, too; to get another major in would require
the disappearance of an existing one, and even then, the survivors would
mostly divide the spoils among themselves), but it never seemed to anyone
that they properly understood Linux or the Free Software movement in
general.  The approach seemed just like that of a proprietary software
vendor.  The glitz, the companion girls at Linux shows, the big display,
all that.  They also engaged in the worst case of version number 
inflation until Solaris 7 (2.6 -> 7, and even then it was referenced 
in many place in the OS as 2.7): They went from TurboLinux 4.x to
TurboLinux 6.0 with nothing in between.  There was perhaps one point
release in the 4.x series IIRC, and 5.x was skipped entirely.  Apparently,
a bigger version number makes your software better :-p


>I can't help but feel that perhaps RH is shooting itself in the foot 
>with their end-of-support policy...

They may be.  It's the reason I stopped using Red Hat.  I'd been an
RH user in the beginning, then TurboLinux, then back to RH.  I don't
see myself ever going back to RH, or even Fedora, from here.  Distaste
for BlueCurve was a partial motivator, but the real clincher was when
they announced the one-year-to-EOL plan and 7.3 became unsupported.
I never liked RH 8 and never installed it on any of my own machines.
I did it once for a customer who wanted it, but normally pushed Debian
at that point.

>At the moment I'm wondering what to do about my RH 8.0 box...

Debian is one answer.  Also, Ximian is providing paid support for EOLed
Red Hat versions through their Red Carpet service.  I believe they cover
7.3 and 8.0.  Great news for people who don't want to migrate now
and can spend a little.  7.3 was an excellent Red Hat, IMO their best
ever.  This is a good option for people who want to keep it.

Jonathan
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