RedHat have moved from being disruptive in the small end of town (start ups, small ISP's etc) to chasing large fortune 500 companies. They have unashamedly shaped their product to suit the market they are pursuing and smaller firms have been left behind.
They are disrupting upwards in to banks and other large firms with slow (painful... though that's subjective) processes for getting things done. Often they see an OS as a 'CD' to insert before inserting another vendors software CD. Implementing version numbers scare them enormously and 'backporting' patches then adding yet another minor version number soothes their fears greatly.
I am not making any sort of statement as to if this is good or bad, rational or irrational, smart or stupid. Please understand this email as being devoid of any emotion or taking any side - merely an observation.
Though its a fascinating example of the "north west" movement a company tends to make - as described in Clayton Christensen's classic 'The Innovators Dilemma' (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062060244?ie=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393185&creativeASIN=0062060244&linkCode=shr&tag=frag0f-20&qid=1372293137&sr=8-1&keywords=innovators+dilemma)
Dean On 2013-06-27 00:33, Francesco Pietra wrote:
Hello: I noticed that in my country supercomputer center all machines, both CPU (FERMI) and GPU (AURORA, PLX) run on RedHat Linux. As a long time user of Debian GNU Linux amd64, I am curious whether such machines elsewhere also run, or could run, on Debian am64. If not, why? A problem of kernel? Thanks francesco pietra