Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Red Hat Exec Takes Over Open Source Initiative

Posted by Zonk on from the new-man-under-the-hat dept.

njcoder writes "CNet reports that Michael Tiemann, vice president of open-source affairs at Linux seller Red Hat and an OSI board member, has taken over from Russell Nelson as president pro tem. 'We thought that Michael would be a better president' Nelson said of the change, declining to share further details. Nelson will remain a board member and active in the group, he said."

10 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. I suppose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    this is good news. Red Hat has been instrumental in much of the open source movement but they are very corporate these days. I will be attending a RHEL 4 pitch/SE Linux pitch soon, atypical for Linux.

  2. Red Hat the new Microsoft of OSS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "Take over"? I like the sound of that.

    After all, Red Hat is the de facto standard of all open source. Intel's compilers, Oracle and everything corporate is designed for it. Good luck installing not to mention running anything like that on other distributions.

  3. "Open Source" BogoTrademark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Russ made some statements on slashdot where he admitted that "Open Source" was not a trademark but for whatever reason was just as good as one and could be defended in court by OSI.

    Then there was discussion that the "definition" fo Open Source would be reduced to exclude certain Free Software licences.

    For someone in charge of a branding effort all of this seemed a little rash. Perhaps internal dissent is what was going on behind the scenes.

    1. Re:"Open Source" BogoTrademark by Ralph+Yarro · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Then there was discussion that the "definition" fo Open Source would be reduced to exclude certain Free Software licences.

      To be fair to Russ, that seemed to be part of a general corporatization agenda. The pressure to redefine open source was coming from HP through OSDL. A Red Hat guy running OSI is probably just another step along that road. Not saying that's good or bad, but it's what's happening.

      --

      The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
  4. Re:Russ has gotten some heat.. by js7a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Russ himself signed the petition; acording to the petition's author, tomhudson, he emailed to confirm his signature.

  5. I knew Michael Tiemann in college by MichaelCrawford · · Score: 3, Interesting
    His brother Bruce was a classman in Ricketts house at caltech. Bruce majored in chemistry, and had an interest in laser dyes. I'd visit Bruce at home during vacations, when their father was a visiting professor at Stanford, and got to know Michael that way.

    You could tell early on he was going to go far. He had a microcomputer he had soldered together himself from components, and ran a prolog interpreter on. It was the first I ever saw prolog.

    Funny little anecdote, I decided to try out photography after dropping out of Caltech, so Bruce lent me Michael's very expensive Canon A-1 SLR camera. It would accurately meter a thirty second exposure at night.

    The photos on this page of my article Living with Schizoaffective Disorder were taken with Michael Tiemann's camera.

    I've lost touch with them over the years though.

    --
    Request your free CD of my piano music.
  6. G++ bugs by norwoodites · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Really Tiemann needs to fix more G++ bugs which he introduced when he wrote the code. The code has many slow places where he used a crapy O(n^2) algorithm instead of an O(n) one.

  7. I signed it, too. by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For what it's worth, I signed the petition also, and the sponsor withdrew his accusation of racism.
    -russ

    --
    Don't piss off The Angry Economist
  8. Re:Russ has gotten some heat.. by js7a · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I think the main problem people had with the essay (other than the inflammitory title) were these two sentences:
    Actually, come to think about it, we had about 150 years of black slavery, and it hasn't even been 150 years since the Civil War. It wouldn't surprise me to find that blacks are still taught to value their leisure time more highly than whites.
    Not only does this show a lack of understanding of history (slave ships had begun British colony trade at Jamestown by 1620, and were involved with Spanish colonies in North America at least 50 years before that), but the idea that one's value of leisure time is handed down from generation to generation is profoundly anti-individualist and deepl racist on its face.

    I've never met Russ, but after reading his blog I get the impression that he is someone I might like to know (and convince to think about what he writes a little while longer before he writes it), but he is far too outspoken to serve as a figurehead for an organization frequently targeted by professional PR flacks (e.g. Microsoft's.) I don't wish him any ill will, but I think he made the right choice here.

  9. hypoxia by stinky+wizzleteats · · Score: 1, Interesting

    After the last Red Hat article, I did a bit of studying on Fedora and Red Hat (represented by Centos 4.0). The results were quite interesting.

    Fedora is pitched as the beta testing project for Red Hat. Stuff that gets into Red Hat Enterprise is supposed to be proven in Fedora. If you look at the actual packages in each distribution, however, it is interesting to note that RHEL 4.0 actually has newer stuff than Fedora core 3. If Fedora leads to RHEL, how can this be? Has Red Hat, having jettisoned its community goodwill and developer support, been forced to fork RHEL in order to keep it current and supported? Could they be reducing the packages in RHEL in order to keep it supportable and current in what is a dying bid to tide the platform over until Fedora gets enough oxygen to live on its own, much less support the RHEL product? Is RHEL itself a smoke and mirrors operation - an unstable solution inferior even to Fedora that is part of a two pronged marketing operation to capitalize on the Red Hat name at the expense of the quality of their product? Is Fedora the true core of Red Hat, as directly indicated by Red Hat engineers commenting vociferously in the past couple of stories about this? Perhaps Red Hat has realized, as the air sucks slowly out of the room, that the best long term investment of dwindling oxygen supplies is to devote them to Fedora, because Fedora is the only hope for the future of the company. Certainly a closed linux distribution, forked from the roots of the original Red Hat Linux or Fedora, cannot be sustainable in the long term.

    It looks like they wanted us to pull their gravy train for them by beta testing Fedora on our production systems and servers, and now that we haven't done it, they are cannibalizing their internal support and engineering resources to maintain what little momentum still exists in the Red Hat machine until they find the right Open Source affairs guy to get the Fedora engine to "kick in", as it were.

    Sad.