Red Hat Opens Lobbying Office Near DC

wiredog writes "From Government Computer News comes this story about Red Hat's new lobbying office near Washington DC, and mentions that RHEL 4 will have Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 certification."

Comments

Welcome To The Big League

[ackthpt]

RHEL 4 will have Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 certification.

While Microsoft will have nothing of the sort, unless they've lied through their teeth, yet the US Government still will used hundreds of thousands of instances of Windows on PC's throughout countless bureaus.

RedHat will lobby, "Look, we have a totally transparent operating sytem, if it is in any way compromised it will likely be fixed in less than 24 hours and we can work with you to handle logistical details of patching all necessary computers. In the long run we're cheaper, reliable and immediately accountable." To which, a government all to used to chutzpah and hubris over the past few years will reply, "We don't like transparency, haven't you learned anything by now? Clearly our Great Benefactor in Redmond is a better patron and we totally believe him when he tells us that insurgents are behind exploiting security holes."

It's a nice start

[chris09876]

I really can't think of any bad that can come from this. Hopefully it will improve the visibility of Linux for people who make decisions. In certain cases, people might not even know that linux is an option. Hopefully this new division can help fix that.

The article does make a good point with the Exchange servers though. It's been mentioned here before..., but Linux does need some better connectivity with Exchange to help sell some of the people who already have large systems already set up be more comfortable with the idea of Linux.

How long will it be before RHEL 4 "hits the street

[nemaispuke]

I find the comment about RHEL 4 will be released being evaluated at Common Criteria EAL 4 interesting, considering RHEL is not listed as a product in under evaluation yet (http://niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme/in_evaluation.html )! That should take about six months mimimally, so when are we looking at RHEL 4 being released?

Re:Woo hoo!

[discordja]

I've lived and worked in DC for a while now (for a non prof lobbying group to boot) and can tell you it's a much different beast than it's made out to be...tho still a beast.

Most congressmen don't interact with the lobby groups directly. An office will have gobs of LAs (Legistlative Assistants) and they will in turn do most of the contacting and oft times a lot of the deal brokering on some issues.

Most lobbying is nothing more than smart manouvering. You get their staffers drunk, pump em for information, then go to their constituents and whip em into a frenzy when you find the dirt.

About fricking time

[TheGrapeApe]

With M$ tethered to the viciously unpopular offshoring issue, this move just makes sense; "How can you justify giving taxpayer dollars to companies that are hell-bent on shipping your constituent's jobs overseas?". They should have been asking this question a _long_ time ago.

Open Lobbying

[persaud]

Require public Internet disclosure of every meeting between an elected official and a lobbyist.

Think of it as CVS for Lobbyists.

Check in. Check out.

Re:Open Lobbying

[iamacat]

It would be reasonable to disclose that the meeting took place, but probably not the contents. If a politician initially considers to do something illegal or stupid due to his ignorance of the subject during the meeting and then educates himself and makes a good decision, he deserves more credit, not less for actually caring about doing his job. Yet, it would be extensively used in smear campaigns during elections.

Redhat actively supports F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that although they do not provide free binary downloads of their OSes almost everything they aquire thru their profits from other companies they open source.

Also they are providing proper enginerring Q&A analysis to the source code of Linux and is providing a aspect that previously was thought to be lacking in OSS software. (who would pay to do the boring code review?)

So far Redhat has been mostly good for Linux and Linux has been mostly good for them.

I use Debian though.

Re:Lobbying..

[bgs4]

I guess that's funny and all, but as someone who has posted on slashdot before about the evils of lobbying, I can tell you that, as much as I like to see microsoft's lobbyists get some competition, professional lobbying still sucks no matter who is doing it.

The fact is that many congresspeople after leaving office become very highly paid lobbyists. What this means is that their influence on government goes to the highest bidder. If you have enough money, you can essentially purchase your very own Influence on Government (tm), influence which is too expensive for the vast majority. There's no two ways about it, that sucks for a democracy. You might be skeptical that former congresspeople and other highly paid lobbyists actually have all that much more influence on government than your average joe, but the fact is that they wouldn't be highly paid if they did not.

If we can outlaw professional sex workers, I think we can surely outlaw professional lobbyists.

Re:Woo hoo!

[MikeBabcock]

I'm sorry, you think that RedHat's 1.96 billion dollars makes them irrelevant compared to Microsoft's 287 billion?

(when do I get my billion?)