Red Hat spins, SUSE plays it straight

Sam, your bias is showing. Red Hat had a lousy video conference. I get it. You don't like Red Hat. I got that some time ago. SUSE? I support it on a daily basis, not Red Hat. I wish we used Red Hat at work. Life would be so much easier. Having now supported SLES and SLED for five months I could write a very long article detailing the shortcomings when compared to Red Hat and still not do the issues justice. Yes, I'd like SUSE to both improve and succeed, simply because I believe in competition in the marketplace.

Oh, and the ties between Novell and SUSE haven't been fully cut. Guess who supplies enterprise support for SLES and SLED in North America. Yep, that would be Novell. The quality of that support has sadly not improved.

Oh, and I found Adam Williamson's response right on the mark. This is nothing more than a bias driven agenda piece.

Sigh. All good things...

@gus3: Yes, Mr. Varghese has written some good articles lately. This isn't one of them.

@caitlyn I have said nothing about the technical merits of either the Red Hat or SUSE distributions. I have used both briefly in the past but being a Debian user for the last 13 years I really am not qualified to comment on either, apart from reviewing an individual release.

That said, this article is about the attitude of the two companies. It so happened that both companies interacted with me in the space of a week and I was struck by the difference.

That's all I have written about. Take it as such. I have no bias in either direction - I am willing to listen to anyone who gives me a worthwhile story, even George W. Bush. I have always managed to separate the personal from the professional and will continue to do so.

I appreciate your response. However, based on your experience over one week you have made broad generalizations about the two companies.

@caitlyn Not really generalisations, these impressions are the same that I've had about the two companies for a few years now. The past week only drove that home and did it with so much force that I thought it would be good to write about it. It is shocking to me that a 19-year-old company like Red Hat still has such poor media skills within its ranks.

This is nothing new:

We're number two -- we try harder!

@BernardSwiss Avis and Robert Townsend.

@linuxwriter

Yes (and Townsend's book was a big influence on my perspective).

I can't argue with your perceptions, Sam, because they are yours. I just wonder if things are fundamentally different here in the States than they are in Australia. Here we get Red Hat at all the big conferences interacting well with the media.

I don't think Red Hat sees the open-source-covering tech press as all that important to the company's business goals. I could be wrong, but I don't see a whole lot of engagement.

@Steven_Rosenber I am not expecting a lot of engagement with them. But when they do hold a media conference I expect it to run long enough for questions to be asked. Not a 32-minute event when an hour-long one was promised.

There's one school of thought that if you engage the geeky fanboy community, you win hearts and minds of those who will be deploying your product. I guess RH wants to contain that on the Fedora side.