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On Red Hat Bashing...
The following was written by GNOME Guy, Slashdot Reader and pure energy beam, Miguel de Icaza
Recently many people have criticized Red Hat from many points of view, and during the construction of their arguments, they have ignored a lot of the work that Red Hat has given back to the community. Having personal friends at Red Hat and having talked to them in the past has given me a wider perspective on what actually is going on at Red Hat than most people who only have heard about them.
The importance of Free Software (as in Open Source).
People have complained that some ISV companies are targeting a specific GNU/Linux distribution, and that this alienates the users of other distributions. I do believe that people are looking at the problem from the wrong perspective. Many ISVs are not only targetting some particular version of GNU/Linux, they are also targetting a specific platform of GNU/Linux. They are not allowing the end user to make a choice of kernel, the choice of a distribution, or the choice of a platform.
Let me explain: people who write proprietary software are interested in marketing a software product as a piece of intellectual property that they own and that comes with a price tag, which does not provide the end users with any of the freedoms that the GNU project has identified as important for software. Without these freedoms you are not only potentially locked to a particular distribution: you are locked to a particular kernel, and you are definely locked into a particular platform. You will not get proprietary software to work on your favorite port of the operating system. Forget about the SPARC, the Alpha, the PowerPC, the Motorola, and the StrongARM architectures if you go the proprietary way.
Red Hat and Freedomware (as in OpenSource, Free Software)
So far, Red Hat is the only major visible commercial distribution that distributes all of their development under a free license (LGPL or GPL for their new work, or under the proper compatible license for packages they do not maintain). And they also manage to make money during this process.
Now, making money by giving away your intelectual property is a hard problem. Some people have just given up. Various distributions include proprietary code in their distribution to add a value to their product. The result is of course, a non-free product: you as an end user are forbidden from making copies of it entirely, you might not even get the source code in some cases, and you are definetly forbidden from making changes and redistributing modified versions of it. It comes to mind, the proprietary graphical install programs being shipped these days.
Red Hat standing for Freedomware
When the KDE desktop project started to take off, the licensing problem of Qt became obvious to many people: If we allowed this important component to be non free in a GNU/Linux system, then it would have been impossible to have a completely free (in the sense of freedom) desktop system that people could use, distribute, modify, and redistribute.
Many distributions chose to ship the non-free KDE/Qt combo as part of their systems, as it gave them a competitive advantage on the market. Concerns about a free system came in second place. Red Hat instead of going for the easy money, actually devoted a growing team of programmers to help build a completely free desktop: I am sure they lost sales while preparing for this free system to be built, and I am sure it costed them money to pay their GNOME programmers.
Still, Red Hat stood up for the free software community. To them it was more important to have a full open source desktop than making a quick sell. Given that the Qt toolkit will soon be released with an open-source license this is not an issue anymore. I am presenting this exclusively as an historical data point.
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Red Hat and Debian are my favorite Linux-based distributions. Actually, they are the best designed and open distributions of Unix from my point of view: they do ship all of their code under a free license.
This, from my point of view is very appealing. Various of my friends are involved in deploying free systems based on GNU and Linux in Mexico in a number of very different setups.
They did require modified versions of the installation program, and modified versions of the packages they use. Not all, but some of them. So the distribution is pretty much Red Hat Linux with some added features that they need for their vertical application. This is something that can be done legally thanks to the fact that the Red Hat distribution does not include "special cases".
Doing something
If you want to see commercial-grade applications on the free systems and have users have total control of the code, the platform, the operating system and the distribution, promote free software: help free software developers, contribute code, contribute proof-reading time, contribute documentation or help other people understand why free software is important.
Disclaimer
These are just my personal opinions. I am not speaking for any project I am involved with in this mail nor am I speaking for any organization I belong to. These are strictly my personal opinions.
I do not work for Red Hat and I have not worked for Red Hat in the past. I have just contributed and worked with their hackers in the past.
Miguel de Icaza.
miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx
This sort of article is the type of crap I get sick of. It's not a straightforward RH bashing, but it's nevertheless plays into that mentality.
but RH is a business run by businessmen.
So what? I've heard this argument again and again and again in the Linux community, and it makes no sense.
It's a business. That in itself is not evil. It makes it different...or are you just admitting you are scared of something that is "different"? Do you really need to be reminded that *many* businesses promote research and extend technologies everyday, ranging from computer technologies, engineering, and basic science research? We buy from them as consumers _all the time_. If they're bad, we've been buying from them for ages and are implicated in their longevity.
Really--I think it's because of the threat of a "business mentality" calls up all sorts of bad images. But frankly, we view the worse and forget the best and average that businesses produce. A different mentality in the Linux community isn't going to kill us, and if we can't handle it, Linux deserves to be splintered for their incapacity of staying together.
However, should this get taken too far, Debian is right there.
And? Are people so caught up against Red Hat that they've forgotten the basic principles behind Open Source? It's been like this ever since someone modified Open Source source code. You have a choice to use it or not. You have a choice to modify it.
Not to mention, this "Debian is right there" approaches more of a _business_ attitude: there is competition. You know what? Good. I like that. Better code is written, more products are released, programs and distros improve.
All this RH bashing is simply like-MS sentiment brought into the Linux community. People use what they will and what they want. They have the right to be stupid. But, as the MetroWerks article a few days ago showed, there are people that have created RH FUD. MetroWerks NEVER had an exclusive agreement, and RH NEVER forced them to. But people here still insist, without evidence, that RH is evil because of a product's packaging. If you don't want it shrink wrapped, don't buy it.
I don't use Redhat's distro, NONE of my servers are Redhat,
I use Debian, but I will NOT bash redhat for three very simple reasons.
Alan Cox
David Miller
Stephen Tweedie
They Make LINUX better every Day and Every way,
I as a Linux USER benefit directly from their work.
If they thought that Red Hat was Evil in any way, these people wold not WORK for Redhat.
Redhat is a company, even great company's make mistakes, or do things that I do not agree with.
Oh and one other thing, Redhat has contributed SOURCE over and over again, how many people can claim that?
As a Debian user I use software that redhat helped develop, it makes my system MORE secure and easier
to use, the software? PAM.
This is just another example, of Redhat ability to produce source that I use every day and benefit.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
The important thing, IMO, about this response is that it doesn't indicate Red Hat only compatibility, but rather Red Hat only support, which is a vastly different thing. It makes perfect sense to me that a company like Metrowerks would want to explicitly limit the environment they have to support. At the same time, it seems to me that if Red Hat wanted to do something nasty (a la Microsoft) they would have asked for Redhat only compatibility.
In the end, I think that Red Hat is just a little company that's trying to do the right thing. So far they haven't done anything to be upset about, not that I've seen anyway. In fact, their only sin seems to have been success, and if we (as a community) don't get past the success == sin idea then we're doomed to destroy ourselvs.
Like the article said: Red Hat has given a lot back. Let's not lose sight of that just because a witch hunt is exciting.
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