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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope
Brainsur writes "ZDNet reports about Redhat : European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act. While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism, the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community."
I disagree. I believe Red Hat makes quite a bit of their money from supporting their customers, than from just selling the software packages.
To most companies, the initial cost of software and hardware is not nearly as important as the long term support contract/plan. Many people thus choose Microsoft, because it provides support, while if you went with Debian, there is no support phone number to call when you run into problems.
And support is exactly why my ex-employer went with Red Hat, because he wanted to keep his x86 hardware, and also has the power of a UNIX system. I suggested using Slackware, because that's what I was running at the time, and he liked it. But after shopping around a bit, he decided to go with Red Hat because they provide support, and he is willing to pay $$$ for support.
Unstable and Testing are the Debian categories, because they concentrate on having a rock-solid system, as opposed to running recent software.
Testing level packages are (if I remember correctly, it's been a while since I used straight debian), are what most other distro's have had on their install CD's. Recent, but not the latest versions of the software, and may or may not require upgrading.
Unstable is the latest versions available on the apt-repository. They havent been though the months and years of testing and the like that the debian guys put stuff through.
If you don't like how they do this, but you want to use apt, you can try one of the other Debian based distro's out there (I use libranet) which combine the ease of use of the APT system, but using recent releases of the software. And you can select the level that you want to download from (apt-get -t testing/unstable install packagename)so you can download whatever version you want.
The only time I've had a problem running apt, was actually just yesterday, when I was trying to use their precompiled 2.6.8 kernel package, and all that required to fix was rebooting and selecting the default 2.4.21 kernel.
Asiide from that, my system has been solid.
Hmmmmm, let's see...
1. RPM. Read the Linux Standards Base documents?
2. Anaconda, the install/setup program.
3. Kudzu, the hardware detection system used by Knoppix and others.
I could continue, but I think those three on their own more than justify the company's existence, if nothing else.
While I will admit that as an overall distribution I was not overly enamoured of Red Hat 9, RH have contributed solutions to a number of vexing problems for us, and also carry on a very active development effort at sources.redhat.com.
I'm also detecting some of the usual commie whining (No, I don't think OSS is communist, but this is) about a company that's daring to actually make a large profit here...as if every company purely by virtue of its existence had to inevitably emulate Microsoft's bad behaviour. However, it might behoove you next time to be a little more sure of your facts before you start bitching.
Let's see. ...
They have many people daily working on the kernel.
They have many people daily working on glibc.
They have many people daily working on gtk.
They have many people daily working on gnome.
They have many people daily working on
>What is RedHat giving back to the Linux community on which it feeds?
They ARE a BIG part of the communty. Accept it.
You are paying (1) to get updates, (2) for their warranty protection, (3) for the right to get tech support from Red Hat and (4) for the (limited) right to use their trademarks on your computer with the software. If those are of no value to you, then don't renew the subscription -- I think all you need to do is edit out their logos and name.
Red Hat's business model is built around adding value to Linux. If none of that added value means anything to you, then don't buy it.
With developers like this, who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.