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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."
While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism
I think this guy has it all wrong. The GPL isn't about altruism, it's about selfishness, and that's a good thing.
I must admit, I'm a bit cynical, and thus I have some trouble believing in altruism. I think Richard Stallman had a brilliant idea with the GPL. It was a way to turn the selfishness of every programmer, that desire to be able to look at how something was done, to both his advantage, and the advantage of people around the world.
What he's done is to create a system, whereby people with that programming itch (and you know what I mean if you've got it), will give away access to the product of their hearts and minds, just to be able to satisfy that itch when it comes to someone else's work, or someone else's improvements of their own work.
As a programmer, I think there can be no greater boon than to have people who want to use your software, and, even more so, people who want to see how it's written, and possibly improve it.
I manage serveral servers for a small sized ISP. Mod me down, but over the time since RedHat released their Enterprise line, I have felt that RedHat was going into the dark. People have become skeptical over their support schemes which they blatantly charge for. Their packages and applications have become too "closed" and again, somewhat dependent on RedHat Enterprise, period. We now prefer OpenBSD and FreeBSD over Linux. We call it simplicity over formality, not that it is all that is to it. Distributions like slackware or debian and the BSD flavors out there works just great and they are more flexible than RedHat Enterprise is. Besides, setting up and maintaining RedHat Enterprise is simply not much fun either!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I think this is what it will boil down to:
Rehat vs. IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun
1) Sun's JavaDesktop is based on Suse Linux, and provides a very good mechanism for updates, for just one time cost of $50 (includes Star Office).
2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office.
3) IBM and Suse have been working with each other for a while. Especially in the Lotus Notes area.
4) Novell's new directory services can be used on Suse Linux.
5) Suse can be a cluster resource in the Novell Clustered environment.
Where does RedHat fit in this picture????
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism
Redhat is competing with Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Suse (Novell) and dozens of other firms in the OS market and you're describing its big challenge as surviving the marketplace for altruism? I don't think Linus cooked up GNU/Linux just so it could be run on the machines of geeks for the benefit of other geeks. He must have known that when he tossed that source code out onto the Internet that there was no telling where it would end up. Redhat's focus must be the blue-white fires of the business computing marketplace or it will be as passe as the "Nifty Fifty" of the 1970's. Where are they now? Ever check out the list of the Dow Jones Industrial Average components in 1960 versus now? Today's Microsoft is tomorrow's Litton Industries or Penn Central Railroad. Compete or die.
If you want to look deep into the future for Microsoft, this site tells all.
In principio erat Verbum.