Red Hat Rivalries at Salon

EvilNight writes "There's an interesting article up on Salon that makes a few comparisons between Red Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading. They also touch a little on the squabbles between LinuxCare and Red Hat. " A very good article. Covers a lot of the issues, and clearly.

Comments

A little worrisome...

[Ethelred Unraed]

I'm a little worried about this putative rivalry between Red Hat and LinuxCare, if it is indeed as rabid as Salon makes it out to be. Love 'em or hate 'em, Red Hat is quite possibly the most important distribution for getting Linux to spread beyond its current user base, with perhaps SuSE close behind. Red Hat gets most of its income from support, not from sales of CDs.

Suppose LinuxCare, which does not have its own distribution, were to choke off Red Hat's supply line by killing off RH's support. Where does that leave Red Hat? Where does that leave Linux in general? We'd be left with Debian, Slackware, et. al., all of which are highly advanced distros, but none of which can really set foot in the enterprise or home market (cf. PHB, MomTest).

In the end, only Red Hat and SuSE are in a position to spread Linux beyond its current "market" and seriously challenge Microsoft. If one or both of them dies off (or at least only limps along), Linux will not get anywhere. _Some_ kind of corporate or organized backing is needed.

I'm not suggesting that anyone boycott LinuxCare for the sake of Red Hat--far from it. I wish them well. Rather, I suggest that Red Hat and LinuxCare merge, cooperate, or that LinuxCare offers its own polished distro, for the sake of the greater good. A rivalry between the two--as things are now--is a Very Bad Thing(TM).

Just my thoughts...

cya

Ethelred

Another essential: Open Employment?

[Noel]

This article got me to thinking. It's great to have the Open Source, but that's not sufficient to keep the open software explosion going. There are at least a couple other areas that must be opened for the free software community to continue its phenomenal expansion.

One is that we need to have access to hardware documentation in order to write drivers. Fortunately, we have seen much progress on this front. In the past few years, many companies have realized the value of releasing their programming docs so that drivers can be written. (I would like to know if the NDAs that RedHat has negotiated include release of the HW docs when the GPL'ed code is released, though...)

The other is that we need to have Open Employment -- the freedom to hack no matter who is our current or previous employer. Until recently, this hasn't been much of an issue, since few people were paid to hack free software. Now that we have many companies that pay employees to work on free/open software, we need to ensure that the employers don't restrict the freedom to develop.

This restriction could be done in a number of ways, either explicitly or implicitly. An explicit restriction could be a clause preventing employees from working on similar or competing products when they leave the company. An implicit restriction could be something like an NDA on hardware docs that only releases them to that company's employees. Both implicit and explicit restrictions tie the developer's productivity to remaining with the company. If restrictions like this are in place, then a developer who left the company, for whatever reason, might not be free to continue their work.

Now, I'm not accusing Red Hat of having these restrictions. In fact, I think Rasterman's recent departure from Red Hat to continue work on Enlightenment at VA shows that Red Hat does not have these restrictions.

But now that commercial Free/Open development is becoming the fad, I think it might be time to think about some Open Employment guidelines. Here's a quick brain dump for you to chew on (or chew up and spit out):

These Open Employment guidelines are designed to safeguard the freedom of an Open Source developer to continue contributing to the community.

1. The employer may not place restrictions on the developer that would prevent them from continuing to work on an Open Source project when their employment with the employer is ended.
2. The employer may not tie incentives to the direction of the developer's Open Source development.
3. The employer may not restrict the open discussion of Open Source projects, except as required by NDAs in pre-release situations.

The neat think about commercial Open Source development is that companies are realizing that what's good for the community is ultimately good for the company as well.

Comments?

Why do people do this..?

[Retalin]

Lets just get down to the facts of the Everyone vs. RedHat. When it comes down to it RedHat is the driving force of the linux world. Im not at all taking anything away from any distrobutions out there, in fact I use Slackware, but if it wasnt for RedHat the community would not grow.

A brand new linux user cannot simply jump into slackware and install it and get everything going because its not "easy", however on the flip side of the coin all they need to do with RedHat is boot up and click Workstation, Server or if they want to get to the nitty gritty, Custom and they are rocking.

RedHat has done what it set out to do. It has created an operating environment using the linux kernel that destroys anything Microsoft could ever produce. I love to hear people on the internet say "I hate RedHat" because when you ask them "why?" they just stutter, and say because its crap, or because its no good. They cant give you a true honest reason.

RedHat as a company is not doing anything wrong. They are trying to get into the corporate market, and to do that you have to have an image that can be presented to CEO's. A naked woman with a RedHat CD over her ass is not going to get that for them. When you have an investment you protect it. This is merely all RedHat is doing and you CANNOT blame them for that. They are not playing any of the dirty games that Bill Gates did/does, they are producing an awesome OS that is free. For crying out loud just leave them alone and if you "dont like RedHat", there is a simple solution. DONT USE IT, and DONT push your opinion on other people.

Re:CodeWarrior?

[substrate]

CodeWarrior isn't shackled to RedHat. People with a clue are capable of running it under other Linux variants and are doing so. Some assumption had to be made about the installation, MetroWerks chose RedHat. No doubt RedHat did some campaigning for this. That's their perogative.

MetroWerks is releasing RedHat for Debian in the future according to their press releases. This may be the result of campainging by Debian. That's their perogative.

Users presently have a choice of an easy install under one Linux variant: RedHat. Soon they will have the choice of an easy install under two Linux variants: RedHat and Debian.

Clueful people will of course still be able to make it work with their variant of choice with additional effort. Any shackles against doing so are imposed purely by your skills.

If every linux vendor agreed on standard places to put things and standard technology this wouldn't be necessary. None of the vendors seem to be making any real comittment to doing so however (creating some ficticious standards body which recommends your distribution as the standard isn't a real comittment)

I don't work for MetroWerks, RedHat or Debian, though I used to be a satisfied customer of RedHat (not so satisfied anymore)