The Fedora-Red Hat Crisis

jammag writes "When Linux journalist Bruce Byfield tried to dig for details about the security breach in Fedora's servers, a Red Hat publicist told him the official statement — written in non-informative corporate-speak — was all he would get. In the wake of Red Hat's tight-lipped handling of the breach, even Fedora's board was unhappy, as Byfield details. He concludes: 'If Red Hat, one of the epitomes of a successful FOSS-based business, can ignore FOSS when to do so is corporately convenient, then what chance do we have that other companies — especially publicly-traded ones — will act any better?'"

Comments

welcome to the world

[timmarhy]

maybe when your a bare foot long haired hippy like stallman you can afford the luxury of disclosing everything to the world, but when your a company with peoples futures and jobs on the line often its not a good idea to expose all of the details.

frankly anyone who can't see that has never been in a real business situation before

Re:The real world is a bit different than that.

[Bruce Perens]

They harmed the FOSS community because they got in the way of the FOSS developers responding appropriately to their own security problem.

They harmed their customers because a business with more than 50 people has SOx to deal with, and to pass their own audits must be able to assure their own security with more than just a "you're OK, we promise". Even if they didn't have SOx to deal with, it would be bad practice for any security officer to accept "just trust me".

Bruce