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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."
it seems to me the Linux community is bound to canibalize itself with this whole distro thing. If some distro publisher/devellopper actually wants to make money out of it they clearly invite criticism an anymosity from other in the Linux community, they instantly become a target of choice, limiting further growth.
However it seems to me that without capital investment the Linux evolution will suffer, not in quality but pace. I'd be surprised that Linux ever become better than Windows or MacOSX if no "burst of developement" is made possible by managing to get developers to work day in-day out on a project. Appart from a lucky few not many people in our days manage to get lots of free time to program. People also need to pay the rent so I don't see many option here, someone has to find a way to make money out of this if it's to evolve at a decent pace.
however, by focusing on their product (proprietary) and not the entire community, those develloppers slow the whole Linux evolution and defy it's purpose.
So what's left?
If the community would agree to all work on one distro (or a very few flavors; embeded, desktop, server, etc.) develloppement would be fast and simplicity would finaly be truly part of the equation, interoperability would be a lot easier to deal with too so would be security, interface coherence and uniformity, and about every part of devellopement.
As long as everyone will try to be the one Linux, the one people will choose over the others, Linux is bound to be eaten by it's own community.