Re: [tlug] Is Red Hat successful in Japan?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Teddy" == Teddy Caddy <info@example.com> writes:

    Teddy> Does anyone in the TLUG know if large enterprises are using
    Teddy> Red Hat?

I don't know if you would count national universities as "large
enterprises", but I know that our department (not the whole
university) had a Red Hat contract 2000-2001.  They let the contract
expire because we lost a tech support position, and they couldn't
afford to support Mac + dual boot RH/Windows on Intel hardware.

Of course there's nothing "mission-critical" about workstations in the
student labs, and our servers are all Sun boxen.

    Teddy> How does a western company like Red Hat compete with other
    Teddy> Linux distributions?

What other Linux distributions?  The Japanese distros are not
enterprise-ready, except maybe TurboLinux, and that's not (originally)
Japanese (unless the State of Utah defected sometime in the 1990s...).

    Teddy> Are there any Japanese Linux websites in English that might
    Teddy> have this information?

No.  Ask Red Hat; there aren't going to be independent sources for
this information.

First, Japanese accounting standards are designed to conceal, not
reveal, information that might allow evaluating corporate performance.
There are a number of people who have done surveys, but they refused
to release enterprise-level information to me or my students, citing
"privacy".  (Like corporations have genitalia or something.  Hah!)

Also, this kind of data was not collected by the government until at
the earliest 2000, as until 1999 all software was lumped into "office
expendables," along with paperclips and Xerox paper (except for that
bundled with hardware, which of course is accounted as hardware).

So it's unlikely that anybody but Red Hat knows.

That said, maybe there's some stuff on http://www.odsl.jp/, but I
think that's almost entirely Japanese (except for the parts that are
in C or Perl ;-).

    Teddy> If you had a "mission critical" Linux deployment at work,
    Teddy> would you have somebody else support it besides Red Hat?

Me.  Is there any other answer?  If you're not supporting it yourself,
it's not "mission critical" by definition.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.