Red Hat exec says Novell sells beta code

When SLES9 came out it had the 2.6 kernel, which Red Hat also said was crap (because they "wrote" most of it)... and then later came out with their own 2.6 distro that was based on a less stable 2.6 than what SUSE used.... typical....

Yes, I remember that - while redhat was busy maintaining their own special fork of 2.4 plus backported scheduler and other stuff, suse shipped SLES 9 with the 2.6 kernel. It was, and is, best described as "solid".

Even now, it's a workhorse in our data center:

root@ashpool:~> uptime 2:38pm up 964 days 2:08, 1 user, load average: 2.17, 2.36, 2.36 root@ashpool:~> uname -a Linux ashpool 2.6.5-7.151-smp #1 SMP Fri Mar 18 11:31:21 UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

qasles10

Uptime: 5:15am up 440 days 17:01, 4 users, load average: 0.12, 0.03, 0.01

Linux qasles10 2.6.16.21-0.8-bigsmp #1 SMP Mon Jul 3 18:25:39 UTC 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

(from our nightly recording of such things... of course, would be better to be running something patched... ah.. the upsides and downsides of uptime)

The main thing in RHAS 3 was backporting of posix threads to 2.4. That was pretty unique, but of course, 3 months later SLES 9 came out and slaughtered them in the benchies. Then RH did RHELAS 4, then RHEL 5, made an oops, had to come out (called it a naming change) with RHEL 4.5 (so older sw would continue to run) and now RHEL 5.1 (what would have been called Update 1 prior to the 4 to 5 debacle). SLES 10 avoided the debacle by releasing before the kernel changes were made to obliterate support for some older stuff. Red Hat has really bad timing.

Just for "hysterical raisins"... Red Hat watched as SUSE Prof. 9.0 came out, based on the 2.4 kernel and I think they assumed that SLES9 would likewise be 2.4 based (and thus they released RHAS 3 with a 2.4 kernel). I think they got taken by surprise when SUSE switched to 2.6 for 9.1 and based SLES9 on that.... and thus the propaganda about how horrible 2.6 is, etc.

We'll have to see if the "we write crappy code" propaganda technique works for Red Hat or not. I'm guessing "not" at this point.