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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."
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.
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.
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Here's the google cache of the withdrawn article.
put the what in the where?
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.
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!
A couple of issues:
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.
" 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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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