Linux users worry about desktop products' fate

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The End of an Era

I have a ?tradition? of buying the latest Red Hat release on the day of first availability. After reviewing the latest Red Hat announcements, I have decided to go a different route for my Linux usage. As a longhaired hippie-freak capitalist, I applaud Red Hat?s moves to a ?branded? product / market / profit-driven strategy. As an experimental musician and computational finance geek, though, it?s time to change *my* strategy.

The "branded" Red Hat Enterprise Workstation release costs $179US for downloads and $299US if you want physical media. And the *trademarked* "Fedora", the "successor" to the Red Hat "explorers" line, is only available by download. I am probably the only denizen of Silicon Forest who still doesn?t have broadband ? my latest attempt to get a cable modem was greeted with derisive laughter when the installer took a look at the trees between the cable box on the power pole and my house. So I need release media. Finally, I'm tired of waiting for Red Hat to support my (top of the line) sound card. If I gotta do it myself, I ain't paying $299 for the privilege.

What direction am I going? Well, it wasn't a very difficult decision, given that SuSe is going to Novell and Mandrake 9.2 has been reported to destroy the firmware in CD-ROM drives. So my home systems, currently happy as clams running various mixes of Red Hat 9 and Windows, will migrate over the next few months to mixes of Windows and Debian "Woody". When RH9 support ends on April 30, I'll be, if all goes well, fully migrated to whatever Debian stable release is currently available. And I'm going to be experimenting with Debian GNU / the Hurd / GNUMach and OSKIT, possibly even L4 "Hazelnut" or "Pistachio".

I got into Linux in general and Red Hat in particular because I wanted to "roll my own" experimental music, and because I have some computationally-intensive finance codes that require performance-tuned open-source math packages. At this point I'm primarily interested in getting audio / digital signal processing / algorithmic composition "into the kernel", with direct OS support for MP4 / Structured Audio / SAOL (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/,) for example. I love the thought of contributing to an open-source effort, but I'm *not* interested in "donating" my design, development, testing and documentation skills to a for-profit corporation like Red Hat.

Ed Borasky
http://www.aracnet.com/~znmeb/

Posted by: znmeb   Posted on: 11/04/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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