It is RHEL

the rhel5 announce list from Red Hat indicates that clearly, and Red Hat doesn't care.

We test Red Hat, SLES, BSD and several other *nixes. If installing RHEL is taking hours then you have h/w issues.

I don't 'interface' with Red Hat's sales team, but the JasperServer issue sounds like sale has grown up to be a vaporware big boy.

I don't have any issues with RedHat of SuSE products, to me its about configuring your desktop and getting the apps you want. *Full disclosure*, I run FreeBSD at home...

OSS?

'The physicists at CERN and Fermilab got pissed off paying for RHEL a while back and now recompile it from source with their own branding'

Which is why the OSS model is not a money generator and therefore useless to base a software business on. Got the source, compile it yourself, pay the company who wrote it no money unless you need support and only then if you desperately need help as the support costs are steep.

@paul

I'm not saying RHEL is bad or loosing share relative to all operating systems, but I think it's losing market share within Linux, as more distros come to the market.

Once upon a time Red Hat was without a doubt the dominant Linux distro, but over time others have come along to compete. There is now CentOS, Oracle et al if you want a pure Red Hat clone and then there are a whole host of non Red Hat distros.

Virtually no one runs Red Hat at home any more and SMEs are looking at CentOS or Ubuntu or Novell.

I'm sure in absolute terms Red Hat sales are going up and up, it's just that the Linux market is expanding even more.