Red Hat CEO Decries Open Source Pretenders

OSTalent writes "The Register has an article about Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik's recent remarks...'For all his enthusiasm about the community and sever-side Linux, Szulik provided something of a reality check on the much debated theme of a Linux desktop. According to Szulik, the huge presence of legacy infrastructure like Microsoft's Exchange and PowerPoint has prevented a lot of people making the move.'" From the article: "It's very difficult to shape the development agenda of the community... every day people comment to us on the quality of our products through Kerrnel.org. What's important is staying true to the premise of the GPL model ... It starts with the APIs now, then it moves into content. Try to put [Microsoft's] Windows Media Player into Firefox and see what it looks like. In a world where application-to-application interaction becomes the norm, where does that innovation come from and who owns it?"

Comments

non-sequitur

[SuperBanana]

Red Hat CEO Decries Open Source Pretenders

Funny. This from a company which releases software like GFS, but then seems to almost actively dissuade other distributions from using it.

I'm hard-pressed to come up with other examples right at the moment, but it seems like I've run across several "open-sourced" stuff from Redhat which had virtually zero documentation- not even so much as what they actually DO, how to set them up, etc.

So I'm going to flip it back at RedHat's CEO- buddy:

• releasing an Open Source package and giving it nothing more than a nearly blank page on the Redhat site doesn't quite count.
• making a distribution, not providing it in binary form, and making it virtually impossible to compile from source, doesn't quite count.
• Using lawyers to chase down with a vengance (ie engaging in a thinly veiled attempt to crush) a distribution which (god forbid) exercises its right to use the GPL to build a FREE copy of what you're forced to provide source for...not only doesn't count, it's not very nice, either. Just because something is within your legal right, doesn't mean you have to be an ass about it, and from what I recall, RedHat skipped directly from "hey guys, RedHat is a trademark and we kinda have to control how it is used, so could you please remove it from Whitebox" to nasty-gram- from-the-lawyers.
• Using the community to help you develop/test your product, doesn't count. Especially when it's so poorly tested internally, v1 ends up hosing people's machines. I still don't recall anyone at RedHat apologizing for the fiasco that was Fedora 1.

Sorry, folks. I'm just plumb unimpressed with RedHat. They seem very much for taking from the GPL/OSS community, but even more for protecting the hell out of their revenue stream to the absolute line the GPL allows them to. Hell, I can't even get a non-commercial license for RedHat's commercial distribution to learn it, and has anyone SEEN how much the damn certification costs!?