Red Hat to ignore LSB?

warpeightbot writes "CNN.com is carrying an IDG article expressing concern that Red Hat may not support the Linux Standards Base for various reasons. Sounds like FUD to me, but if it's on CNN, it has to be dealt with one way or the other... " The article itself is like the 90th Red Hat conspiracy piece I've seen in the mainstream now. Its crossed the line into amusing now for me anyway.

Comments

Red Hat and the GPL

[Master Switch]

Red Hat's unwavering support of the GPL, and their strict insistance on applying it to all that they do, leads me to believe that they are not, nor will they ever, try to take "ownership" of the Linux movement. Red Hat has done a fine job, and whether you like to admit it or not, if it wasn't for them, Linux awareness would be two or three years behind where it is today. Red Hat was one of the first vendors to support multiple platforms. They put up the money to help with GNOME, and now also KDE. They fund the development of graphics card drivers, and they are partially responsible for much of the recent Kernel development(Alan Cox). I don't see the other vendors stepping to the plate like this. Don't get me wrong, I like SuSE, SlackWare, Debian, etc... But I am somewhat dissapointed with other vendors willingness to give back to Linux.

Unofficial Statement on Red Hat Software and LSB

[Michael K. Johnson]

This is not official word, since I'm not an officer of Red Hat Software. That said, almost everything I say here, Red Hat Software has said officially in several contexts, and regular /. readers will see little new here. I'm not sure that this statement is needed, frankly; the majority of the comments I have seen so far are right on the money.

Red Hat Software is supporting the LSB project both practically, by participation, and philosophically, by agreeing that the LSB is a good idea and expressing our expectation that it will produce a useful and workable standard).

By now, most /. readers will have heard Red Hat Software's general policy, rarely broken, of not preannouncing software releases. We stick to this policy for many reasons, but two really good reasons are our absolute disgust for vaporware and murphy's law. Things will go wrong and change our delivery dates from time to time. That does not keep us from working on software, obviously -- it just keeps us from preannouncing.

The same is true for our support of the LSB. We will not preannounce that we will make Red Hat Linux LSB-compliant when the LSB does not exist. That does not keep us from expressing our expectation (it's stronger than simple hope) that the LSB will be a good standard that we will want to implement because it will make our users' lives (and our own work) simpler and easier. We contribute publically to the effort to build the LSB standard, reserving our judgment for the completed standard.

To the folks who think that Red Hat Software is trying to corner the market in black helicopters, I'll only say that a good enough LSB standard would be very good for all of Linux, abolutely and most definitely including Red Hat Software. But if you think that Red Hat has bought the black helicopters, you aren't going to believe a word I say anyway. ;-)