Red Hat buys Hell's Kitchen Systems for $80M

Anonymous Coward writes "Yahoo reports Red Hat is buying this e-commerce company. Their product (credit card verification system) appears to be closed-sourced." I called Melissa London at Red Hat to find out the scoop; it's all open source above the API. Below that, the verification system makes use of the financial institution's proprietary protocols, which are made available to HKS under NDA. It's not perfect, but until the banks get clueful, it's the best we can hope for.

Comments

Re:Jan 5, 2002

[Booker]

Hrm, I see your point - sort of. If your 190GHz Athlon can't run GnomeIII, then why aren't you running WindowReMaker? You've got the source, and it only requires 10GHz.

Skip Mozilla 18.63, too - Armadillo surpassed it in speed and stability long ago.

As for your boss, just happily tell him you're running Red Hat (keep the splash screen) and run your BSD. With the Linux acceleration layer, nobody will know.

My point - open source is open source, and I could care less who buys what company, for the most part.
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Banking protocols ARE open, get the facts straight

[jon_eaves]

The bank protocols are open. At least here in Australia. They are governed by a standard called AS2805. (There is a variant called AS2805F used by FDR-A). It describes the protocol messages used by the banking network to communicate things.

I could go into long and boring detail about what each of the messages do, but to preserve sanity, I will refrain.

What is "closed" is who the banks will talk to with this protocol. This is a "good thing" (tm). You are required to have your product certified by the bank by a test regime that they require to be performed.

So, you can get a copy of AS2805, write a gateway (open or closed source, your choice) and talk to your local bank about getting an expensive X.25 connection to them, and you can pass financial transactions (in my case credit card transactions) to the banking network.

How do I know ? Well, I've done it.

The company previously known as ABA (now eSec) built a real-time credit-card transaction system all in Java. I was one of 6 programmers involved in the development.

Offtopic rant: There is some desperate need for many of the Slashdotters to do some research or thinking _before_ posting. The editors posting stories should also be a lot more responsible in their editorial comments. Slashdot has recently become a very "bandwagoneer" production which is starting to mimic the popular press.

Lift your game, or lose your readers.

What do they have to "get clueful" (sic) about?

[morris57]

Please, emmett, do tell. Why did you include that bit of editorial comment in a redhat story?

Was that a news story or opinion? Do I get a chance to read the story and decide for myself what opinion to form?

Religion versus Fiduciary Responsibility

[Tom Christiansen]

Redhat is not here to promote causes. They are not a charity. They're a business, one pulicly incorporated. As such, this business exists to serve its stockholders first. In fact, if they don't, they're quite apt to get sued. Ever heard of fiduciary responsibility? That doesn't mean that one cannot try hard to live by one's principles, but the crucial principle here really is the bottom line.

Then again, I suspect that what Macchiavelli said of States can be equally applied to Corporations. They are not "moral" or "principled" in the sense that a man can be.

Re:Pollyanna attitudes

[Hello folks]

If this is your plan, you better get a sock and a shotgun, because your money's gonna be in your dresser.

Security through obscurity is the only thing that people understand. Maybe they're wrong, but maybe they're right. It falls once again into an issue of information. WE ARE HIPPOCRITS. We want all information to be free, but mandate privacy. See a discrepancy there?

This isn't flamebait, but it should get an "Inciteful." You say that there is a difference, no, there isn't. If those companies that are being requested by you to give all of their information to you asked you for yours, what would you say?

Jan 5, 2002

[doublem]

Jan 5, 2002

Why can't Red Hat let anyone else into the market? Ever since they drove Microsoft into bankruptcy they've bought every conceivable service on the planet. They have their little red logo on everything, and whenever someone looks to buy an OS it's either Apple or Red Hat. Why do they have to bundle every conceivable service with their systems??? I want to go with a BSD at work, but my boss won't let us because "Everything works better if it's all Red Hat." 90% market share is a pain in the neck no mater who has it. And while I'm on it, why do I need an Athelon 190 Gigahertz and half Tetrabyte of Ram to run their GUI?!?!?!?! I remember when a Merced with a gig of ram was all you needed for SERIOUS computing!

BTW: Mozilla 18.63 still sucks. No browser download should be 200 megs. What happened to the nice, clean, small 40 meg download from not too long ago. It's getting to the point where us poor cheapskates with a pokey SDSL connection can't get along anymore!