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Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs?

Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working?

Then this post might be just for you :-)

The GNU project has always been part of RMS's campaign against proprietary software in general, not against any particular software vendor.

this article would be a good place to start.

I just don't see making distributions being the kind of high margin business that would justify all the interest in RedHat. I think a lot better argument can be made for cross-distribution support and training operations like linuxcare being a big growth market with higher margins.

It's not that I don't think that RedHat isn't providing a great service to the Linux community, I do. I am having a hard time with the business model justifying the astronomical stock price. If what I think is reality later sets in, a crash in RedHat stock price in the future will not do the Linux community any favors as it might signal a lot of people that the "Linux Revolution" is over.

On the other hand, it might be better if the "Linux Revolution" hype cooled off. Linux doesn't need the hype to be really big. The big industry players (the IBMs, Compaqs, SGIs, etc.) like the hype because it keeps stirring the pot, getting people to buy new systems and services. Just as customers were tiring of the Microsoft/Intel Upgrade Treadmill, here comes Linux to get customers back on the "install a new IT infrastructure because it's the coming thing and we don't want to be left out" treadmill.

http://www.linuxc are.com/news_columns/suppt_pit/1999/08-25-99.epl

Exactly what you're asking for !

Let me just jump in here before the dicussion gets too rough :-). Here is the full quote from the original article you snipped:

Core confidants

Torvalds insists any attempt to list his core confidants will be incomplete and will likely offend someone. That list, however, would have to include:

• Alan Cox, in Swansea, Wales, who probably has the most influence on Linux of anyone besides Torvalds. Torvalds calls him a "second Linus."
• David Miller, of Durham, N.C., who controls many networking aspects of the kernel.
• Stephen Tweedie, of Scotland, who develops Linux's virtual memory and file systems.
• Another developer, in Hungary, has driven SMP development in Linux.

(end quote)

Your interpretation of these paragraphs is curious, at best. Look at the part about 'someone in Hungary', it clearly shows that the author simply did not have enough time to write down Linus' (incomplete) list or did not recognize the name from the tape recording. If the author of the article knew what list he wanted to ask, he surely would have known all the names. The list is declaredly not exclusive, so it could as well include your favorite pick of kernel hackers. The above one does not - I'd suggest you to get over it, it's not the end of the universe :-).

If you do not believe me, go take a look at this LinuxCare kernel development traffic-analysis, it shows that SUSE and Red Hat kernel hackers are pretty active. linux-kernel is the primary kernel development mailing list, all active developers are posting to it, because Linus several times declared that he prefers (mandates?) discussing all major Linux kernel issues on linux-kernel. In the 'top posters' stats you can see all the people mentioned above, plus contributions from SUSE, Transmeta, the academic space and many other companies. The suggestion that this is just some sort of manipulative M$-ZDNet cabal, is, uhhm, rather childish and does no good to Linux, really.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about it on the linux kernel development mailing list, with many people on different sides.. Look here to see what people on the list have been saying.

-- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?

Here is a link to some more case studies over at Linuxcare.
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Here is a link to some more case studies over at Linuxcare.
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