Red Hat monopolises Linux distro mind share

WHILE SEVERAL Linux based vendors showed up at this year's exhibition like last year, the only major distributor present was Red Hat. The company's booth seemed to attract even more people than last year.

Even more puzzling was the fact that Novell's SuSE Linux, Sun's JDS and other distributors like Linspire were nowhere to be seen. Small ISVs and others like Point Horizon offered open source based products, like its Pointcall voice thing built on top of Asterisk, the open source PBX and VoIP (voice over internet protocol) gateway software.
The folks at the Red Hat booth did a great job promoting the advantages of Linux

Red Hat attracted a lot of people to its presentations

There was also another Linux VoIP firm, Aspinet. Not local, the boys came all the way from Puebla, Mexico, in the far North, and also offered VoIP and PBX products.

The Barracuda booth showing its Linux based email scanner appliance

Also present were local distributors of the Barracuda anti-spam and anti-virus appliance. These rack mount appliances run a tweaked version of the Linux kernel, and can be administered using a Web interface, with the ability to update spam and virus definitions by the hour. The thing acts as an SMTP gateway, filtering spam and viruses and letting the "safe" email pass through to your email server. One interesting fact is that the Barracuda appliances are charged on a per server basis, rather than per user.

From Mexico all the way down to Argentina: Aspinet's VOIP and PBX open source stuff

The local distributors of NOD32, an antivirus product, also promoted its Linux software, as did a company dubbed Ferozo, which sells web-based "hosting control panel" software that allows hosting customers to install scripts and assorted software into their shared hosting accounts with point and click ease, and in perfect Spanish, something local customers find very important.

Debian fan

Remember SCO? There was no line of people waiting to buy it...

But the fact remains that other companies that are supposedly selling Linux products, like Novell, IBM, Sun, and Linspire, to name a few, missed a great opportunity and left Red Hat monopolising the exhibition and the visitor's "mindshare". The fact that a company was able to came down all the way from Mexico to offer its open source VoIP kit, but Novell, IBM, Sun and Linspire marketing was nowhere to be found speaks volumes about what Red Hat is doing right and these other folks are doing wrong. µ