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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope

Posted by michael on from the walking-the-linux-plank dept.

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."

8 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. I disagree... by dmayle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    means striking pleasing postures for the investment community

    I disagree completely. What it means is that you need to do right by your investors, not the investing community in general. If you're an open-source based company, your investors should realize that, and, if they are unhappy with the way you are treating your company, they have the option of selling it, or trying to force a hostile takeover.

    An open-source company has to keep it's reputation, and it's actions towards the community as it's most important goal, because teamwork requires goodwill. The problem comes with all of the investment companies who buy into Redhat not because of who they are, but because of how much money people think they can make them. (It should be a little of both.)

    Once that is accomplished, the rest should fall into place. The attitudes and actions of the company should determine the value of the company. It shouldn't be the other way around.

    1. Re:I disagree... by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Far too many people strive to maximize profits in the present, while neglecting the risk that their actions might cause a disruption in the slow-but-steady cash flow they already have.

      Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to "the community" for no direct financial reward in order for them to have the credit in the community to get the development they need in the future.

      It's truely a balancing act. Give away too much and you give away the store, but give away too little and people who you aren't paying will stop doing your work for you...

  2. Translation: Open Source is not free by Chemisor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > Profiting off of Open Source requires that a
    > business must sometimes give valuable IP back to
    > "the community" for no direct financial reward in
    > order for them to have the credit in the community
    > to get the development they need in the future.

    In other words, you want to use Open Source, you must "pay" the price in development effort. Or else. I don't know about you, but I prefer traditional business contracts with the price clearly stated upfront instead of this nebulous "you must contribute" obligation where you can always be accused of "not pulling your load". Of course, most companies do not sell their source code, as I am sure at least one hundred replies to this post will indignantly point out, but that is not the issue here: my complaint is about honesty. If you want to call your software "free" (as in beer), you better damn stand by that and not arrogantly state that "Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to the community". I have no problem with those who require payment for their work, be it money or development effort, but you better state that before "giving away" your software, and you better not be calling it "free" (that last one for you, GPL!). In the business world, such practices are called bait-and-switch, and are illegal. Of course, on Slashdot, any Open Source criticism is flamebait, so I guess I am just wasting karma points...

    1. Re:Translation: Open Source is not free by ebuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Apart from the fact that your deliberatly imposing free (as in beer) upon licensces explicitly stating free (as in speech), let's look at the moral "requirement to contribute".

      If you feel that there is such a requirement, pay back the community by paying someone who will pay back the community in code.

      Buying RedHat (or SuSE, etc.) will fund the companies that currently hire programmers to work on Linux (and it's associated software suite). These companies don't hire these programmers out of altruisim, they do so because it's their team who's going to be struggling with the problems in debugging / integrating the applications.

      It's remarkable that should you decide to take this mantle upon you own shoulders, you don't have to pay the price to them. But you will pay the price (internally), and if you feel that it's too great a burdon, I suggest you don't bother with software / computers at all.

      Every action (and application) has a price, even those which are not purchased. The reason open source software will never die is because it's cheaper. You only pay the price of learning to live with the software you have, instead of first paying to get your hands on said software and then paying again to learn how to live with it.

      Don't submit code back if it's not your cup of tea, just go out there and buy a copy from someone who does. If you feel no moral requirement to do this, then there's no reqirement at all. That's freedom, and it cuts both ways.

      Cheers.

  3. Re:Best thing that Rad Hat did... by kortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I often hear people bitching about Red Hat. Sometimes it gets old, bitching about Microsoft I suppose. Not enough bitching about Apple's elitism for damn sure...

    I've used RedHat since 5.2, and now I run Fedora, I still have all the functionality and features of any other distro. I'm still not running Windoze. Still compile any kernel or source I need. Still not paying for my OS. And I'm willing to bet my systems are up and running from a blank hard drive a hell of lot quicker than those of the whiners.

    RedHat has done more for linux that any company out there, go dig up some stats about which distros corporations are adopting (READ: REPLACING WINDOWS SERVERS) the most. With all due respect - you are *not* going to find Gentoo or Slackware on that list. Suse is still a distant second. Where will Linux hurt the pocketbook of M$ the most? Corporate America, that's where. I'm sorry, but as a linux protagonist, that is where my priorities lie - working on curing the disease that is Microsoft

    Despite it's blunders - sociopolitical or otherwise - RedHat has done a LOT for linux and for that we owe them thanks if nothing else.


    RedHat is not the enemy.
    --
    -- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
  4. Holy .com mentality Bat Man! by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...striking pleasing postures for the investment community.

    Yeah, who needs customers so long as some chump is giving us venture capital!

    Now order me up another one of those Aeromonto chairs and install a Pac Man in the executives washroom!

    We do computers! The laws of economy do not apply!

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  5. Re:Operating System of Choice? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Well, what did you expect? Of course they "blatantly" charge (how else do you do it?) for their services. If you don't want them to be producing signed updates and such for your systems and don't need them to be able to take care of your systems, then don't use it! That doesn't make Red Hat "dark" or "evil".



    There's way too much nonsense spouted about Red Hat. Some people see that they're making money (that usually means, performing a valuable service to society) and think that's somehow impure.

  6. Re:Hmmmm by True+Grit · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Aaahhhh, a Fedora snob! :)

    Yes, apt-x is cool, there is no middle ground. What if I want a semi-new package, but I don't want to crash my machine using it? Stable is a couple years stale already, unstable is just that, and testing says it all. That leaves me to compile from source, and if I'm going to do that, might as well use slack.


    Spoken by someone who clearly doesn't know Debian. This FUD is getting really old for a lot of us. I've been using Debian unstable for at least three *years* with only one catastrophic failure which I solved by booting off my "emergency boot disk" (a Knoppix CD) and reverting the package that caused the problem.

    Unstable is constantly *CHANGING*, *not* constantly broken, that's what Debian means by "unstable". If you were more familar with Debian you would also know there *is* a middle ground and there is more to Debian than apt-get. There is aptitude and synaptic, which make it easy to more finely control the updates of your system, allowing you, for example, to only update the things you need and put the rest on hold, so you miss 95% of the minor problems that everyone suffers because they always run apt-get upgrade and update the world once or twice a day, when they probably don't *need* to have the latest and greatest of every package, and they are very unlikely to need it within 24 hours after its been released.

    Bottom line: Using Debian Sid *responsibly* (update only what you need, and only once ever 7-10 days, not daily) is just as safe as using any other recently released distro. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many people like me doing it.

    P.S.: Cool kids want to get work done too! :)