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Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project
Blahbooboo3 writes "In a bid to attract a larger following among developers, Red Hat has spun off its Fedora open source project into a more independent foundation. As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation but Red Hat will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support." From the article: "The proposed patents common, which mimics the Creative Commons licensing scheme for creative works including art and music, is designed to enable developers to exchange ideas with fewer concerns about patent infringement. and Red Hat's efforts to lobby for patent reform in the U.S. and Europe."
Reminds me of the time that Wind River Systems "spun off" the support they initially gave to the FreeBSD project after buying out Walnut Creek CD-ROM. The community had sent them a number of questions, and their answer was something along the lines of, "We will continue to encourage emerging stewards of the FreeBSD project," along with paragraph after paragraph of additional meaningless duckspeak, in the same form as, "By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions."
What I'm essentially trying to say, then, is that Red Hat will, for a short time, continue to give equal amounts of support to the Fedora project. But this will slowly wane, as I believe has been Red Hat's plan all along. That is why the name was changed from Red Hat Linux to Fedora Core. They will eventually turn as many components of their so-called Enterprise version of Linux into closed source, proprietary software, in the same style as most of the UNIX OSes out there. The kernel will continue to adhere to the GPL, as will other major components (think Samba, Apache, etc.) with their respective licenses. But I think that nearly all Red Hat development will be in the closed source arena.
This way, Red Hat will have achieved the following interesting goal: They are widely known as the de facto Linux standard, because they were open source for years and provided a lot to the community. But on the other hand, they will be able to make a lot of money on their Enterprise stuff, because most of it will be proprietary and the technologies therein will be unavailable in Fedora or in any other Linux for that matter. Think Mac OS X. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be about as open source as Apple's software... Sure, hundreds of thousands of lines of code are open source. But the really good stuff, the really innovative stuff, the new stuff that no other OS has is proprietary, closed source, binary, and locked out of view.
This, I believe, is Red Hat's plan. I don't know about you, but I'm putting on my tin-foil hat.