Red Hat Shake-up, Desktop Users, and Outta Time
Our top story tonight is the seemingly sudden resignation of Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. In other news, John C. Dvorak says "Linux has run out of time" and Infoworld.com says there may be problems with Red Hat Enterprise 7. OpenSource.com has a couple of interesting interviews and Nick Heath has five big names that use Linux on the desktop.
In a late afternoon press release, Red Hat announced the resignation of long-time CTO Brian Stevens. Paul Cormier will be handling CTO duties until Stevens' replacement is named. No reason for the sudden resignation was given although CEO Whitehurst said, "We want to thank Brian for his years of service and numerous contributions to Red Hat’s business. We wish him well in his future endeavors." However, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says some rumors are flying. One says friction between Stevens and Cormier caused the resignation and others say Stevens had higher ambitions than Red Hat could provide. He'd been with Red Hat since 2001 and had been CTO at Mission Critical Linux before that according to Vaughan-Nichols who also said Stevens' Red Hat page was gone within seconds of the announcement.
Speaking of Red Hat, InfoWorld.com has a review of RHEL 7 available to the general public today. Reviewer Paul Venezia runs down the new features, but soon mentions systemd as one of the many new features "certain to cause consternation." After offering his opinion on several other key features and even throwing in a tip or two, Venezia concludes, "RHEL 7 is a fairly significant departure from the expected full-revision release from Red Hat. This is not merely a reskinning of the previous release with updated packages, a more modern kernel, and some new toolkits and widgets. This is a very different release than RHEL 6 in any form, mostly due to the move to Systemd."
Our own Sam Dean today said that Linux doesn't need to own the desktop because of its success in many other key areas. While that may be true, Nick Heath today listed "five big names that use Linux on the desktop." He said besides Munich, there's Google for one and they even have their own Ubuntu derivative. He lists a couple of US government agencies and then mentions CERN and others. See that full story for more.
Despite that feel-good report, John C. Dvorak said he's tired of waiting for someone to develop that one "killer app" that would bring in the masses or satisfy his needs. He says he has to make podcasts and "photographic art" and he just can't do that with Linux. Our native applications "do not cut it in the end."
In other news:
* Linux hits 23 - the Time Machine that changed the world!