Red Hat Exec Takes Over Open Source Initiative

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."

Comments

I suppose

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Credentials?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Michael Tiemann have the right trollish credentials? I'm not sure I've ever seen him post to Slashdot at all, let alone start a flamewar.

w00t

[Nicholas Evans]

There is a god. This guy was a bad slashdot troll, I'm telling you...

Red Hat the new Microsoft of OSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Red Hat the new Microsoft of OSS?

[LnxAddct]

I'm not sure if that was a compliment or an insult to Red Hat, but regardless, Michael is a good guy with a good head on his shoulders. If you've ever seen his writings or hear him talk you'd know what I mean. Afterall, he did write the first GNU C++ compiler. He recently also did a little video thing for Red Hat magazine showing the benefits of open source. He truly is an innovative and important guy in the community. Congratulations to him. For those who don't know, Red Hat has many individuals like this that are just as influential and important in the OSS world (i.e. Alan Cox), don't let one bad marketing decision make you hate Red Hat. Without them, who knows where we'd be, even OSS programmers have to eat.

Regards,
Steve

P.S. For a little blurb on Michael, read this.

"Open Source" BogoTrademark

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"Open Source" BogoTrademark

[Ralph Yarro]

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.

Re:"Open Source" BogoTrademark

[Russ Nelson]

A Red Hat guy running OSI

I don't look at it that way at all. It's more like "The creator of g++ is heading OSI".
-russ

The beginning of corporate management of OSS?

[Kip Winger]

Many non-profit projects out in the world begin as independant projects, but as they grow, are later staffed and controlled by a board and a board chairman all comprised of the powerful ones who bring in profits, the business owners and such, who are the ones capable of further expanding and funding the operation.

For most of the 1990s, OSS was by programmers for programmers (and to an extent their non-programmer friends), but gradually those in the OSS field have been coopted by the business practices of capitalism, removing the pure element of communalism from the way the software is developed.

This only portends to what will happen soon: the sponsors of Open Source now include the large dictatorial corporations of the past, including Sun, Novell, and even big blue IBM, and those corporations will soon partition and control as many of the communal efforts as they can.

Re:The beginning of corporate management of OSS?

[dragmorp]

"Dictatorial Corporations of the Past"

That is very ominous sounding of you. A corporation is a collection of people. A corporation requires people to buy their products and services. A community requires people to volunteer and contribute. Everyone in the chain must produce value to continue.

A dictatorship requires guns.

Do you see the difference?

Has the entire world gone mad?

Re:The beginning of corporate management of OSS?

[ajs]

Oh please, just stop. If you have no appreciation for the history involved, then you're not going to be able to contribute to this in an informed way.

Michael Tiemann is the founder of Cygnus Software (which was bought by Red Hat). If you want his OSS credentials, go to any copy of the GCC source and use grep. He's not heading this group because he's a corporate drone for Red Hat, he's heading this group because he's a better choice than ANY OF US!

Re:The beginning of corporate management of OSS?

[Psiren]

Yes he wrote teh C++ front-end, but almost all of the code he wrote is gone now, rewritten to be better. All of the code he wrote was crap code.

That's entirely irrelavant and a stupid argument (if you can call it that). Presumably he wrote the code because at that point nobody else had. Just because it's since been rewritten does nothing to detract from his original contribution. You could claim that the current code is crap because it will be rewitten at some point in the future, and that too would be a stupid argument.

Russ has gotten some heat..

[bhsx]

I wonder if this petition has anything to do with this decision? For the uninitiated, Russ wrote on his blog (and since removed it) about corporate black culture, in an article titled "Blacks are Lazy."
Here's the google cache of the withdrawn article.

Re:Russ has gotten some heat..

[js7a]

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

Re:Russ has gotten some heat..

[ajs]

It's an interesting article with a fairly cogent -- if subjective -- thought about socio-economic origins of prejudice... and yet it's said with all the tact of a true geek. Heh.

Well, at least he understood that people were not taking it as intended, and took it down. Quite a few people around here would have left it up, saying, "what's the big deal?"

Re:Russ has gotten some heat..

[greenrd]

he's advocating equal pay for equal work regardless of race, not calling black people lazy.

Um, yes he is. You can't spin away the title of the goddamned post.

Re:Russ has gotten some heat..

[zerblat]

Not that I agree with Russ's opinions or in any way am sad that he won't be leading the OSI, but if you actually read what he wrote it's clear that he meant the title to be provocative, but not racist as in "black people are lazy because of their genetics".

Of course, it was still a stupid and insensitive title. As a public figure you always have to think about what you say and write and expect people to interpret things the wrong way.

Re:Russ has gotten some heat..

[js7a]

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.

Re:Red Hat stabbed us in the back

[teg]

A couple of issues:

• Red Hat is a major contributor to the open source community, by having enginers on a lot of projects.Bigger than SUSE, Mandrake and Gentoo are absent.
• Fedora a POS? As far as I'm concerned, it's the best distribution available for me as a developer and a long time (10 years) Linux enthusiast. The major shortcoming is with servers, which I don't want to update or reinstall as often as a desktop/laptops.
• Contrary to your statement, Red Hat is the one of these offering a free download - Fedora. Downloading something current from the others (for AMD64) is harder/not possible.

Not familiar with OSS licenses?

[highcon]

If you were, you would realize the potential of anyone to "control" an OSS project. All it takes is work. Evidently these big corporations have a stake and are willing to put in the work to improve this software. That doesn't mean you or I cannot take their improvements and use them however we want, including throwing them out. No one can truly control an OSS project. Their control is tenuous and based on the acceptance of the users of their software. If they screw it up, somebody takes the good bits, starts their own project, and does it right. The users flock to the one they prefer.

I knew Michael Tiemann in college

[MichaelCrawford]

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.

Re:Better fedora?

[bogie]

" stop concentrating so hard on their commercial offerings "

Their commercial offerings are what allow them to finance Fedora, Gnome, people like Alan Cox, and many other OSS initiatives. Plus they give away the source to that commercial offering.

"they leave their grassroots projects underdevloped and insufficient"

Says you. Fedora from the start has been in many users and reviewers opinions one of the better desktop linux distros available.

People need to get over the "Red Hat owes the community something" bullshit. Yes they moved away from the $79 one-size-fits-all model that everyone loved and many miss but they still contine to be a positive force in OSS.

Re:Red Hat stabbed us in the back

[EngMedic]

fedora would be great, save for two glaring errors. First, there are multiple, conflicting package repositories -- and you can't mix and match most of them safely. Second, though it's been promised since core 1, it's still not possible to update from core 1 to core 2 with just yum/apt (and likewise for core 2 - core 3), which means you're reinstalling and reconfiguring your OS every 6 months.

I consider you...

[juhaz]

an idiot. I've probable been trolled, though. But just in case you're just ignorant beyond belief...

Red Hat, Also sells propietary software, but they don't develop it.

Red Hat does not sell proprietary software. You're accidentally right about them not developing it, though, since RH only develops free software. Plenty of it.

also, they make bad publicity for GNU, since they bash most distributions in favor of their own, they spread FUD about Free Software having no support

Right. Developing lots of free software to make it better creates bad publicity. You'd be hard pressed to find Red Hat spreading any FUD, unlike you, they don't need to. For anyone with more than two brain cells and their eyes open, their position with Ubuntu, for example, is friendly competition. Only animosity with competitors that I can remember was with Sun, and not all that surprisingly, started by Sun. As for support... Red Hat's business model consists of selling support for Free Software, no need to say more.

But redhat, doesn't develop anything

You mean aside from employing top kernel hackers, top gcc hackers and top gnome hackers? RH has also invested heavily on gcj to help us gain a Free Java implementation. I'm sure those people would still contribute whatever scraps of free time they had from they day job to FOSS if they hadn't got a job at RH, now, they have a change to do so fulltime without worrying about their jobs. Not to mention purchasing several companies and releasing their previously proprietary applications for free, what an evil thing to do!

Red Hat's contributions to FOSS are among the greatest of any company, ever, and they continue to do that despite your drivel.

They also use our name (Free Software and Open Source Software) as a selling point.

They have every right in the world to describe their stuff as Free Software, since that's precisely what it is.

I'd also be careful about using forms of word "we" when talking about Free Software, since I happen to think you haven't ever contributed one line of code, or anything else for that matter, in your life. Anyone who had, wouldn't be so ignorant as to spread this kind of baseless FUD. Jumped from Windows last week probably, and now you think you know everything there is to know about Free Software? Well, here's the newsflash: you don't.

I signed it, too.

[Russ Nelson]

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