Thursday, October 24, 2019

Red Hat Software has phone company syndrome

Specifically: They don't care, because they don't have to.

Google "jboss sucks." You get about 946,000 results. Google "tomcat sucks". You get about 260,000 results.

So which one did Red Hat Software omit from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, after it had been in the distribution for close to two decades?

Hint: It's the one that sucks less.

Yeah, Red Hat kept the one that sucks more (jboss) and dumped the one that sucks less (tomcat). Because they want to push their bloated buggy application server that nobody really likes (JBoss) and if that requires breaking everybody's migration path from RHEL7 to RHEL8, well.They're Red Hat Software / IBM. They don't care. They don't have to.

Of course, we all know what happened the last time that IBM tried to shove something down people's throats, when they introduced the IBM PS/2 and OS/2. It turns out that people do *not* willingly abandon their old stuff just because the incumbent near-monopoly decides to push their own proprietary junk. Competitors soon outcompeted IBM, and now they no longer make personal computers. Because it turns out that customers will go to the competition if you do customer-hostile things.

Like Ubuntu.

Which is likely going to be what I standardize on going forward, because really, if Red Hat is going to break the world every time they do a new release, why bother?

- ELG