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Red Hat Makes Supported OpenStack Release
judgecorp writes "The OpenStack project could be the 'Linux of the cloud', according to Red Hat, which just announced a fully supported distribution of the open source software. The plan seems to be to offer it as a competitor to VMware's vSphere. From the article: 'The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programs.'"
Red Hat is the sole, most significant contributor or one of the main contributors to to an awful lot of those 'other open source projects':
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions (and that's massively incomplete)
It's a core principle of RH work that as much work as possible is done or pushed upstream, and that RH products should be 100% F/OSS (the exception to this is when we acquire proprietary software and spend a couple of years doing the legal and engineering spadework to make it 100% F/OSS, which is just a terrible thing for us to do, I know).
All of the source for RHEL is publicly available - http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ (and other paths on that server), go knock yourself out. (This is not minimal legal compliance, BTW; minimal legal compliance would be providing only copyleft sources, and providing them only to customers. We don't have to put the entire SRPM set up for public download on our own servers). You can get an evaluation version of RHEL 6 for free at https://ca.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/server/download.html - where 'evaluation' just means 'you only get updates for X days'. You can buy the RHEL Developer Suite - https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/developers/rhel_developer_suite.html - which includes RHEL with every single add-on, and access to all updates, just like having a commercial support contract only without the commercial support - for a measly $99. Or you can just go download CentOS or Scientific Linux, which projects RH does nothing whatsoever to impede.
RH is the single leading contributor to upstream OpenStack: http://readwrite.com/2013/04/16/will-red-hats-openstack-contributions-turn-to-gold
Name me a company that manages to run a sustainable business while contributing more to F/OSS development. One company.