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Is Red Hat the Microsoft of Linux?
RadioheadKid writes "This article featured on eWeek asks the question 'Red Hat: Next Redmond?' It quotes an IBM VP who says, 'There is a backlash against Red Hat from many consumers and government agencies, who fear it is increasingly becoming the Microsoft of the Linux world with respect to its dominance and attitude,' while Red Hat states: 'Our commitment to open source remains absolute, no matter what our competitors are saying.' Is this just some pro-UnitedLinux spin, or a valid concern? What do you think?" Such characterizations are nothing new, but a response on NewsForge from Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan supplies a counterpoint to make the eWeek article worth reading. (Has anyone really seen a Red Hat backlash?)
like some borg'd out guy in a red hat? :-)
go ahead..mod me down..see if i care. Wait, my psycic powers tell me i'll get a troll rating..
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
And where may I ask did you check? Seriously, if the redhat distro of Linux is available for free, tell me where!
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
You really made a good analogy. No matter what underwear I wear I'll have sex the same way; but if I change my sex I'll have to learn a whole new set of body positions and probably need to learn a couple of new oral technique I wouldn't be able to do before....
It's easy to be LSB compliant when the LSB is a Redhat standard - a watered-down, mediocre piece of rubbish designed solely to cause Redhat not to do any work to make their distribution compliant with this so-called "standard" while all the other distributions have to waste time making their distribution as bad as Redhat, destroying years of technically superior design and implementation.
Sound familiar? Yes, Redhat's favourite mentors Microsoft have been known to do the same thing.
Want more evidence? How about the recent attempt in their beta to water down both GNOME and KDE so they don't appear any different? They're looking at making one desktop (like their favourite, Microsoft Windows). Sure, there'll still be people in the community who run other things just like some people with Microsoft Windows run Litestep and other alternatives, but for business all that matters is what the majority do.
Oh, and they create and sell non-open-source software also, so I find their claim of being all for the open source community rather laughable.
Being part of the community means more than just releasing software under a community-accepted license like the GPL, it means accepting changes back that increase the quality of the base distribution, and Redhat are notorious for ignoring such things, just like their mentors Microsoft do.
Matt