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Red Hat Exchange Is Dead
darthcamaro writes "In 2007, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) — an appstore, if you will, of open source partner applications sold from a Red Hat website. Sounds like a good idea, right? While an appstore works well for Apple, turns out that an appstore for open source (from a Linux vendor) isn't such a good idea. 'When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but we've learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is challenging,' Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development said. 'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'"
Did You Know? After maintaining a vow of silence for almost 7 years, Red Hat
Linux founder Marc Ewing now freely admits that he named Red Hat Linux after
Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst's trademark red New York Yankees baseball
cap.
Durst and Ewing met in Ewing's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina (Durst
was raised in Gastonia, NC), where they became fast friends, sharing the
same passion for low-level system programming.
Durst collaborated with Ewing on the first preview beta of Red Hat Linux
before the demands of his rocketing stardom forced him to abandon his hobby
and tour with his band.
Durst's position on the development team was filled by Damien Neil, and not
many know of his contribution to the popular Linux distribution; however, a
google search through the source code on Redhat.com
(http://www.google.com/search?q=wfd+site:redhat.com) reveals many snippets
of code authored by 'wfd', Durst's initials (William Frederick Durst).
Durst asked Ewing to keep his 'geeky' roots a secret as it would not lend
itself to Durst's bad boy image, but as Ewing points out, it was "only a
matter of time" before the origins of his NASDAQ-100 company's name were
uncovered.
And also, *his* problem that he's buying hardware with no free driver support, rewarding hardware vendors who try to make life hard for their users.
(Apart from that, I don't see "running in 2D" as a big enough problem to make me cash out $$$ for Windows 7. Isn't it simpler and cheaper to buy a non-broken graphics card?)