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Red Hat Launches Online Red Hat Magazine
loconet writes "Today Red Hat published the first issue of their online Red Hat magazine, formerly known as the Under the Brim newsletter. Each issue includes Editor's Blog, Red Hat Speaks (interviews with Red Hat personalities), From the Inside (News, Whitepapers, Events), Ask Shadowman, Tips & Tricks, Fedora Status Report, Contests. This month's issue features a detailed article on Fedora Core 3."
All the article links are Flash... preventing an "Open in New Tab". This is certainly a weird way to do rollovers on links.
Debian rules - but RH has it's niche as being the PHB's distro. You won't read about debian in CIO monthly.. ;)
Does it come with a secret decoder ring?
The owls are not what they seem
...actually different from Under The Brim in content? Doesn't look like it. Any other differences?
Interesting! This magazine will give corporate users more confidence on Linux. There will be little new technical information in this site. However, people from companies will find it very usefull, in the same way that they find usefull the Oracle or DB2 magazines. It is just corporate support to the products that they are buying. Great!
This magazine was brim-ming with potential naming greatness, but their crown-ing achievement was "Editor's Blog" and "Tips & Tricks"?! What about Hat Tricks? Brim Shots? Bowler, I Don't Even Know Her? Buy software in the Haberdashery! The Beret-B-C's of Linux? Helmet-ropolitan Opera House?!!! (OK that last one is a stretch.)
Kids these days....
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
A little birdie told me that they want you to read Red Hat Magazine, but stay away from Fedora Core. It will EAT YOUR BRANE.
This month's issue features a detailed article on Fedora Core 3 Wowee! I hope next month's issue has an article on the history of the parallel port!
How is this insightful? Sounds like a troll to me.
.deb.
Honestly though, Debian is great and DEB's are more stable technology than RPM's, but they are also a lot harder to build and that's why there are less of them. It's still easier to deal with a few dependencies in binaries than to deal with them in source form because the author of a package wouldn't take the time to make a
Also how up to date is Debian's distro? It is very stable (and I use it on certain servers), but a lot of the packages are somewhat behind. Cut RedHat a little slack. It is also a lot better than it used to be.
Obviously not the same moderator, and obviously no the entire site's fault. Dumbass.
Exactly. Why is this news that one company behind one distribution is relaunching one of their marketing tools. Thank you /. for giving them the free plug.
This is the company trying to turn Linux in to the most expensive operating system, not the most economical.
This is the company the launched a subscription update service for its users and in less than the duration of a one year subscription cut the legs out from it, and the subscribers who paid money for it, and abandoned the whole flagship desktop product and their loyal users.
Well they didn't exactly abandon it, rather they unloaded it on unpaid labor who do all the work for them and they just control, market, exploit and profit from it. Nice business if you can pull it off.
Me I used to go out of my way to buy Red Hat box sets just to support a company that I thought was one of the good guys. No more. Gentoo for me.
@de_machina
He didn't say it was the same moderator and given what crap I've seen happen here b/c of the moderation system, I'd say it is the site's fault.
you have to see it to enjoy it, this is worth the magazine, the articles are just filling.
Or was it just me, but that site did not play nicely. Maybe it was the useless flash, or the adblocker extension fooling around, but scrolling up or down the page really bogged down mozilla. Maybe the site is also designed as a stress test for your box?
Gnome: A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.
I'm installing Fedora Core 3 now on my laptop. First Linux install in a long, long time.
Since the last time I did an install a lot has happened in the way of package-management. You got RPMs, apt, yum, up2date, red carpet, all this stuff.
Say I want to get "official" updates to FC3's core packages + install some stuff that didn't come with the desktop install (WINE- at least I don't think it did). What's the best method for (1) keeping FC3 up to date and (2) installing new packages, that (3) won't cost me anything (subscriptions, etc.). I'm looking for a method that will allow me to easily upgrade to FC4 in six months without having major breakage of everything I've installed previously. In other words, I want to be upgrading the "official" way.
Any advice?
Is RedHat still around?
if you RTFA:
The downloads for the Fedora Core 3 release have been stunning -- the torrent at Duke sustained over 16,000 image downloads, exchanging about 37TB in just two days!
Apparently one or two people like the project but don't let that get in the way of someone on Slashdot telling you RH is dead, please by all means ignore the fact they're the #1 distro in India, just opened an office in China which is now their main focus. They have office in Munich and landed some very big contracts there. Are currently the #1 installed distro in the world by a landslide according to netcraft. If you guys read that Mag and put down the zealot sword for a second you might see why everyone uses redhat/fedora, It's kicking the crap out of the competition.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Gentoo! Gentoo! Ebuild! Portage! 37.587% speed increase! Rah, rah! :)
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Wow its like not even worth reading slashdot anymore if Redhat is mentioned. All the little debian, gentoo, and suse freaks come out of the word work and freak out. Its like werewolves on a full moon. Listen guys, Red Hat are the good guys, they offer great products and the corporate folk like them. They don't abuse anything or anyone, they open source everything. Try getting Novell to do that, Novell is just testing the waters because Netware failed, they have no interest in OSS, they'll jump on the next big train outta here if they think it'll get them more money. Red Hat's business *is* linux, they were in a position to buy Suse and were close to it but decided the market would be too closed, thats what kind of good guys these are. Anyway, its hard to get through the thick skulls of some slashdotters, but in the real world Red Hat or Suse are the only choices, my experience has been that Red Hat is better, others may feel different. Thats fine, have fun, but regardless of my choice I will support both distributions and tell others of them simply to get the ball out of MS's court. Once we do that, then can we have the linux distro flame wars? It shouldn't be too long 4 years or so, you can wait. ;)
Regards,
Steve
Fedora Core 3 is better than any of your distro's anyway
I may not be a huge fan of Redhat, but it looks like you can get a free Tivo with RH certification.
Is there such a thing as an RPM you install on a redhat system that turns it into a gentoo system in an in-place conversion?
My friend keeps telling me there is and I think he is BSing. He keeps threatening to install it when he is fixing my RPM dependencies.
Sometimes it's necessary to cut your losses and admit that you can't have everything. In my case I embrace RH and their march toward the mainstream. The only way I can 'elect' to run Linux is to toe the line of certification and to RH's credit they have shelled out the bucks to appease all the PHBs in control of virtually everthing. When freedom of choice moments of clarity arise I scramble to fedora or some other cleansing moment...
they unloaded it on unpaid labor who do all the work for them and they just control
... @mandrake ... @debian ... @gentoo ... @suse
... @redhat ... @mandrake ... @debian ... @gentoo ... @suse
... @redhat ... @mandrake ... @debian ... @gentoo ... @suse
... Gnome :-)
But all RedHat does is steal work from these poor programers just look at the end of this comment. They contribute more than any other single entity, dedicating 1/5th of their income to R&D. If anyone deserves a "free plug" certain Red Hat is one of those companys.
$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "@redhat" | wc -l
677
$
6
$
141
$
0
$
657
With the upstream glibc-20041021T0701
$
4760
$
24
$
98
$
4
$
1339
With the upstream gcc-3.4.2-20041018
$
7995
$
4
$
64
$
0
$
2028
Do the same with
by some guy named By my_name on OSnews forum.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
This is better than pee-wee's playhouse (now on Dvd). Will they have a new secret word each month? Scream real loud! PS Love the FC3.
I find it funny that in the tips and tricks section, they take the time to show you the GUI way to configure window dragging with GNOME but go straight to the command line for KDE. Great way to misrepresent a competing desktop environment. Thanks RedHat for your corporate support.
So does this mean the print magazine Wide Open is officially dead? I got my first copy-- went to subscribe (at the redhatmagazine url) and they said they were switching to the magazine being free. I thought - 'Yeah!' and then filled out the application. Since then... silence.
I wonder if this is taking its place and they decided to act like Wide Open never happened. (the jokes are too obvious - please don't even bother)
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"This is the company trying to turn Linux in to the most expensive operating system, not the most economical."
To expand on this more you know there is a problem with Red Hat when Microsoft and SUN can point to them and say Linux is the more expensive option and actually have a plausible arguement when they say it. They are giving a Linux a bad name on the value proposition front and that was its biggest asset and the thing thats fueled its growth.
I know there are big companies that need all the support and are willing to pay for it, well let them throw money at Red Hat, but I think its time Red Hat stop being synonymous with Linux in the U.S. They have painted themselves in to a niche, and its a niche which deserves to be ignored by tech savvy people like the denizens of slashdot who are building systems and servers and know they don't need to throw money at Red Hat for most of what they are doing.
I really with all the people working on Fedora would migrate to Debian or Gentoo and leave Red Hat high and dry and make them actually pay people to do the work they are currently exploiting.
@de_machina
This is the company trying to turn Linux in to the most expensive operating system, not the most economical.
They are doing NOTHING but pushing their own distribution of linux. Who's to say that pushing a non-economical version does harm to linux? I would submit that people buying into a costly distribution with all the perks and support validates linux as a mainstream choice. Let me tell you it's a hell of a lot easier to sell Red-hot then Gentoo or Debian despite the fact that both are free.
To the almighty moderators. This is ; flaimbait,troll and 2 times idiot. Come on zealots.
Uh, cygnus dominates gcc and glibc development and have for a long time before they were part of Red Hat. It doesn't say anything about their commitment to Linux that they haven't axed their Cygnus acquisition so they are still leading the work on it. I think the Cygnus people get paid money by companies, under contract, to support these tools for them and it doesn't exactly have anything to do with the rest of Red Hats business model.
Gnome, yawn...me being a KDE user I could care less.
Your mechanism also fails to differentiate between the GOOD Red Hat before they went public and started worship quarterly results, and the new BAD red hat who could care less about anything that isn't profitable.
"dedicating 1/5th of their income to R&D."
That is kind of typical percentage for most tech companies. Wall Street would probably take a dim view of a tech company that didn't invest in R&D, because they wouldn't have any differentiator from their competitors. How benevolent it is depends entirely on where its going and how much of it they are trying to make proprietary one way or another.
@de_machina
RedHat != Fedora Please don't argue that it is, if it was it would be called RedHat, K?
I think the Cygnus people get paid money by companies, under contract, to support these tools for them and it doesn't exactly have anything to do with the rest of Red Hats business model.
Wrong. Red Hat gets paid, not the developers directly. And Red Hat has hired people and continued to expand on gcc, such as gcj, which could not possibly be part of a support contract.
Red Hat releases everything they develop under the GPL. So how is that BAD?
Did you notice the first one was the kernel?
How you can try and downplay redhats contributions is astonishingly full of crap. Read into what true kernel mod's they've done, we're not talking two line patches here, were talking 2,000 threads to 60,000 threads, and it taking 15 minutes to now 1.5 seconds to load them.
People can ra-ra debian all they want but the money we spend on Red Hat, Red Hat spends on GPL software innovation. I like that deal better than getting free updates from debian.
Good guys and bad guys is bullshit. Red Hat is a company, they will do what they think is going to make money, nothing more, nothing less. If they didn't buy Suse, it was because it did not make sence to their positioning, not because of some honour you seem to wish to see in them.
regardless of my choice I will support both distributions and tell others of them simply to get the ball out of MS's court
I just love a fair and ballenced view. Guess what Red Hat isn't Jesus Christ and MS isn't the devil, they are just companies with the same goal, to make money. On top of that, Microsoft does make a good product. It might not do everything right, but neither does Red Hat, or Suse, or Solaris. Letting a religious feeling decide what tools you use without ever considering actual technical reasons is retarded.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I'm aware of the differences but the netcraft survey was done on RedHat so the point still stands either way. Both projects are highly successful reguardless of what we're being told on message boards or IRC channels.
You are so right. Thanks for articulating this.
It is my impression that debian contributions to gcc/libc areas are limited to testing and documentation. No heavy lifting here.... and that's ok.
If you want to maintain the status quo.
However, if you want to suport linux innovation and development, spending cash on RH is a good place to put your money where you mouth is: they put out, homie, and are commited to the GPL.
You have Red Hat to thank for the fact that Gentoo doesn't suck. Red Hat contributes more to the open source community than any other Linux company out there and they've been doing it for years. Red Hat developers' code is all over the place when you're "emerging". And Red Hat's profits continually go back into improving that same code you're running on all your Gentoo boxes. So really you should be cheering Red Hat on.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Like I said this is not differentiating between the work they did when they were a good company and now when they are chasing quarterly numbers, jerking around their loyal users, and seeking to milk Linux for all its worth. They aren't doing it out of any benevolence anymore, at least it sure doesn't feel like it did before they went public.
Obviously they are contributing to it still but so are IBM, Novell/SUSE, HP, SGI, etc. They are trying to make quarterly numbers just like all the other companies on this list and they have to contribute the work they are doing to justify their premium license costs, back to the kernel thanks to the GPL. They don't deserve any more or less credit than all of the other companies that are doing the same thing. Companies like IBM are probably a little higher on the benevolence scale since Linux is more just a cool tool to them and they make their money on consulting and services and not so much on the subscription scheme Red Hat is using now to exploit Linux.
Its still a fact that they are milking unpaid volunteers to put together their distribution for them. I don't follow SUSE much but I doubt its quite as blatant a milking of volunteers as Fedora is.
All in all I'll take the Debian or Gentoo model where volunteers are contributing their efforts for the benefit of themselves and their user community and not to benefit some nameless shareholders on Wall Street.
@de_machina
"and they've been doing it for years"
I'll say this again. I was a loyal Red Hat buyer back to 5.x. I went out of my way to buy box sets up to 8.0 just to give them money to put in to Linux. I bought a subscription for the update service as soon as they came out with it. I used to love them. No more.
The day they stick a knife in their flagship product and all the loyal users and developers who got them where they are they stopped being worthy of your hero worship.
The fact that they were once the best thing that ever happened to Linux has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the new Red Hat of the last year or two, since they started fixating on their stock price, bites.
@de_machina
Okay you keep saying over and over how RedHat is exploiting linux, or "milking unpaid volunteers"
rmap, nptl, O(1) scheduler, O(1) VM layer, drivers, tcp/ip stack, selinux, statefull linux, exec-shield, gcj, mozilla, Anaconda, RPM, kudzu, GTK2, GCC, Glibc, ext2, ext3, GFS, and soon Netscape directory.
I'll put that up against Apt-get if you want to have a contest about who is "milking" the community more. Debian or RedHat/Fedora.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Err, the amount of revenue brought in by the remnants of the old Cygnus business is relatively
small. Pull out the quarterly reports and look at the "embedded services" and "embedded
subscriptions" lines. Then compare to total
revenue, R/D expenses and the like. That ought
to give you a feel for how much they spend on
R/D vs funded compiler development.
great example of a well-placed "retarded."
Seriously... even Times new Roman is better than that... just because X seems to have and issue with font rendering, doesn't mean you have to propegate it.
> exec-shield
Ingo's work is cool, don't use it but its good. Doesn't make up for Red Hat shafting their loyal customers and developers.
> selinux
I think the NSA did this originally. Not going to worship Red Hat over it.
> O(1) scheduler, O(1) VM layer, drivers, tcp/ip stack...
If Red Hat's wasn't there someone else's would be if there was a need. Sure maybe it would take longer, or be a little rougher, not really gonna adopt your apparent position Linux would be useless and hopeless were it not for Red Hat.
> Anaconda
Don't use it, don't care, most packaged distro's have installers, big f**king deal.
> RPM
Did use it, don't anymore. I found it to be a curse, looking for the damn things that match the system I had, and you eventually end up with a Frankenstein of an unmaintanable system. After you've installed enough of them outside of the official release you eventually end up with an urge to wipe the whole thing and do a fresh install.
I'll take Gentoo anyday. Tried both and I sleep better at night with the Gentoo approach. I never have to look for a binary match and I at least know everything is compiled against the same bits.
> kudzu
Was this the prober in Red Hat 8. If so I did use it, I quickly started despising it. Don't use it any more, don't care. Maybe its better now, naive users obviously need something like it, again I personally dont care.
> gcj, glibc, gcc
Again mostly Cygnus, and yes they are a part of Red Hat now. Its probably not a good thing.
> GTK2
Well I have used it and I can say I'm generally happier using Qt or almost any other GUI than either version of GTK.
> ext2, ext3
Mostly predates the evil Red Hat. I'm using reiser lately. Filesystems are dime a dozen now, not anything I need to worship Red Hat for.
> Mozilla
Don't know how big their contribution to it is, sure there is some, doubt they like "own" it. I use Konqueror so I don't care though its cool Firefox is putting a dent in IE, it was actually covered on CNN this morning.
Bottomline I really don't care if you spend all night listing everything they ever touched. If they fell off the face of the earth Linux would keep on keeping on. Like I said I used to love and worship them as much as you do. They jerked my loyalty over in a big way. Companies only do that to me once and they are toast.
I have no problem if they decided to do their enterprise edition but they should have left their flagship desktop release and their subscription service as it was, charge enough to break even, and deal with it if it wasn't hugely profitable. By axing it they did serious harm to Linux because they caused a massive discontinuity in a distro that up till then had been reliable. If nothing else they obviously created a whole lot of animosity they would have been better off without.
@de_machina
It's good to see they finally sped up yum, it was HORRIBLE in FC2... took 10x as long to do the same thing as apt-get upgrade.
is a print periodical, with more than a certain number of pages, devoted to the BSDs.
BTW: I'd pay for that.
Yes NASA developed SElinux, but it was having difficulty breaking into the mainstream, RH hired Russel Coker and pushed for its inclusion into 2.6 kernel I can assure you they have paid people working on this so that it will work with every day tasks instead of only being applicable to 'hardened' distro's. This is huge IMO
5 .htm
kudzu is hardware tool, used in knoppix to get that "works on any hardware" people were screaming when it first came out.
gcj/gcc/etc you say its probably not a good thing, have you read the changelog over the last year? Pretty incredible stuff. There is a couple things from the Article here I liked too about GCC:
GCC 4.0 has Static Single Assignment (SSA) performance improvements -- SSA's usefulness comes from how it simultaneously simplifies and improves compiler optimizations, by simplifying the properties of variables. and
The FORTIFY_SOURCE extensions add both compile-time buffer overflow detection, and very low overhead runtime overflow protection. This is an excellent development tool to help improve the quality of code out there, and a current aim is to have the -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE option to compile the entire Fedora Core 4 distribution! (Nothing shipped in Fedora Core 3 makes use of GCC4) For more information on this, refer to a posting made by Jakub Jelinek at http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-09/msg0205
I concider these good things. So have the last 5 years since cygnus merged.
I don't mean to say redhat wrote all these apps from the ground up although they did for some. Just that almost every top notch app for linux you can think of had a money player behind it like RedHat/SuSE/etc. What does this mean? Free distro's are the ones benifiting more from the $$$ guys.. The $$$ guys are the ones piling on the features we ask for, they're the ones giving us the "killer apps"
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Is this like an oxymoron ...Jumbo shrimp, Military Intelligence, happy windows user??
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
that 'box set' still exists as fedora. why do people keep bitching about this?
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
Actually, your response is quite naive and simplistic:
Good guys and bad guys is bullshit...
How do you figure? So, by your reasoning, any random company sucks just as bad as Enron. Not likely. Corporations are like any other construct created by humans. They may be used wisely and for postive purposes or they may be used to bilk and steal from their "customers." Or they could be at any number of points in between.
Guess what Red Hat isn't Jesus Christ
Okay, now who is being retarded? You completely disgregarded the point the original post made and switched gears, trying to paint the poster as some idiotic Red Hat fanboy. Good strategy: When you don't have an argument, why not try a personal attack? The guy never made mention of why he wants to "get the ball out of MS's court." There are many other possible reaons beyond whether or not they make a good product. And, there was never any claim that any vendor does "everything right," nor do you have enough information that this is a religious as opposed to a rational decision. If anything, you seem to be the more irrational of the two posters.
But, of course any sane person would have to question the intelligence of someone who actually claims "Microsoft does make a good product."
(Hey, this personal attack stuff works pretty nicely!)
Why not try OpenBSD if you're a supporter of OSS OS's? Seriously...
Heh...i like the name of the department (submit-debian-articles-just-for-fun dept) and hooray! more daily reading![eh..actually i think i might have to consitter it..i dont like red hat...it's to robust and slow...i wish i had a fast computer..] (that takes the place of MausI and II that i have yet to finish and im worried because i have a test soon!)
From an OpenBSD fan... This has to be one of the best replies I've ever seen on slashdot! You said it straight out about MS, RH and your comment on 'religious feeling', well said man! Cheers!
that 'box set' still exists as fedora. why do people keep bitching about this?
STFU Fanboy.
Fedora is the unstable devel version. At one time, the affordable version of Red Hat didn't amount to paying to beta test.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You won't appreciate much in this magazine if you are not curious about software, are a die hard Debian fan, or simply know quite a bit about Red Hat or Fedora Linux already.
I've bookmarked it, will review it regularly, and will consider passing along articles or the URL to friends and associates as it is appropriate.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (June 2004)
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (June 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
You found a bunch of redhat email addresses on your redhat install and redhat packages ... very interesting!
Then why is redhat astro-turfing every opportunity it can? slashdot/osdn/whoever they are these days are getting paid to make this redhat/fedora thing look bigger than it is. redhat isn't kicking the crap outta anyone, they're going down.
...
... the word of the day (for redhat)!
Their overall market share is way down
Down
The Debian crowd should crawl out of their communal comfy navel and actually RELEASE their distribution before complaining about others.
Unstable has the stability of jelly nailed to the ceiling.
How much money were you sent by the Debian or Gentoo community this year? Since they're obviously not "milking" anyone you must get paid for your contributions (and obviously if you weren't a contributor you wouldn't be whining, right? right?)
What?
Oh that's right, you get nothing but the right to use and redistribute the software.
Whereas those evil _bastards_ at Red Hat, they're milking volunteers and all the volunteers get is...
hmm.. the right to use and redistribute the software.
Let's try that again...
You are an person determinedly anti-Red Hat, deceiving himself for who knows what reason into believing that when one person profits, others must lose. Yet the very essence of Free Software, which you claim to support, flies in the face of this supposition.
So we must conclude that you're a person of weak intellect, and not capable of thinking for himself, and that's why you've chosen to follow the millions of mooing Slashdot cattle, chanting "Red hat is the new Microsoft, Stupid is the new smart, blah blah troll troll".
Red Hat are no saints, but they're a Free Software company, bringing money in from outside the community, rather than just smearing around resources that already exist inside the community.
They've never trod on my toes which is more than I can say for Debian, since a rather famous Debian maintainer added old BSD-licensed documentation into our GPL application, then a year or two later sent a wild accusatory letter demanding that we remove this tainted material and find the perpetrator... only to go quite silent when we informed him of the email address on the changelog...
Red Hat did try to pay me back for my contributions through an IPO letter, without ever knowing that I used their software or had praised them to others, as a non US citizen it seemed overly complicated and risky to invest in their stock and so I turned down their offer. Perhaps if you'd been one of those volunteers being "milked" you'd have become rich by now and wouldn't be moaning about how I am being exploited.
Why don't you grow up? Red Hat contributes to the Linux community. Don't like RH? Then use Gentoo or something else. I use Gentoo almost exclusively but I do not complain about RH. Red Hat is still a Linux company, unlike Novell; I trust RH much more than SUSE because Novell could live without Linux and RH could not.
OK I haven't RTFA, but from the summary, it sounds like they're just changing the name of their old magazine.
--
Take some Oregano Oil for your health and well-being.
Check your agencies.
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
"Yes NASA developed SElinux"
How did you get +5 insightful when you apparently didn't know it was NSA not NASA.
"gcj/gcc/etc you say its probably not a good thing"
You misunderstood though I wasn't clear. I meant to say I'm not sure its a good thing Cygnus is part of Red Hat since it gives one vendor with dubious motives more control over the some important fundamental tools.
"Just that almost every top notch app for linux you can think of had a money player behind it like RedHat/SuSE/etc."
All depends on your outlook. Another way to look at it is someone will proably step up to fill the niches that need filled. Without all the money flowing from Wall Street maybe it will be slower or rougher, but it is a really bad thing for Linux if we reach the point it has to have huge infusions of money from Wall Street to exist and grow.
If a publicly traded company contributes, great, as long as they don't start acting like they own Linux. Maybe I should clarify my point. There are a lot of great engineers and programmers doing great work for Red Hat. I have no bone to pick with them, I'm glad they are getting paid for their work. Still doesn't mean I can't have complete and utter contempt for their execs, especially their founders and their marketing people. They look to be about standard for the obnoxious marketing people you find in any proprietary software company. Young and company have giant gobs of cash in their pockets from their IPO and they should be treating the community that made it for them with more respect.
The one great beauty of Linux is no one company or person owns it. When companies start acting like they do or conning people in to thinking they do, which Red Hat seems to have done to a lot of suits in the U.S. it is just bad.
The community needs to drive whom to them that they can fall of the face of the earth and we wont care. If they wont to contribute great, just don't sucker us in to buying their software and services and jerk us around like proprietary companies do.
@de_machina
How did you get +5 insightful when you apparently didn't know it was NSA not NASA
A typo
If you know who Russell Coker is chances are good you know where SElinux came from. Thats like saying you know who Dennis Richie is, but never heard of C or bell labs.
All depends on your outlook. Another way to look at it is someone will proably step up to fill the niches that need filled
"Probably" isn't good enough. Look at all the great things Linux has done in the last 5 years, which one of those things was an inititive started by gentoo or debian? LSB? utopia? freedesktop? OOffice? Mozilla? Evolution? The free distro's stand around bitching about how to attack a problem while suse/redhat/sun/ibm are writing solutions. What major features am I using in the kernel right now that was written by a debian or gentoo dev? Anything that speeds performance by 40%? Any security related patches that prevent exec of arbitrary code? Did they take linux from 8 processors max to 64-128? We need these guys to dump money into gnu/linux or all we have is a booting toaster (sarcasm). I remember what linux was like in 1998-99 and it was horrid when I look back at who's made it a better system from then till now and I support the ones doing the brunt of the work.
All the little debian, gentoo, and suse freaks come out of the word work and freak out. Its like werewolves on a full moon.
Hey, what about us Slackware freaks? Ooooowwww...
What?