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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."
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.
the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community.
Who knew the secret ??? to profitability was Voguing.
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.
> 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...
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 $50 (includes Star Office).
2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office.
3) IBM and Suse have been working with each other for a while. Especially in the Lotus Notes area.
4) Novell's new directory services can be used on Suse Linux.
5) Suse can be a cluster resource in the Novell Clustered environment.
Where does RedHat fit in this picture????
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I often hear people bitching about Red Hat. Sometimes it gets old, bitching about Microsoft I suppose. Not enough bitching about Apple's elitism for damn sure...
I've used RedHat since 5.2, and now I run Fedora, I still have all the functionality and features of any other distro. I'm still not running Windoze. Still compile any kernel or source I need. Still not paying for my OS. And I'm willing to bet my systems are up and running from a blank hard drive a hell of lot quicker than those of the whiners.
RedHat has done more for linux that any company out there, go dig up some stats about which distros corporations are adopting (READ: REPLACING WINDOWS SERVERS) the most. With all due respect - you are *not* going to find Gentoo or Slackware on that list. Suse is still a distant second. Where will Linux hurt the pocketbook of M$ 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"
...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!!!!
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.
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.
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!