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Red Hat Moves Into European Linux Marketplace

Posted by Roblimo on from the it-feels-strange-to-talk-about-a-linux-"marketplace" dept.

bOnUs (among others) slipped us the skinny on a story @ silicon.com that talks about how Red Hat is gonna use recent cash injections from Dell, Oracle and IBM to increase its presence in the heart of S.u.S.E. territory, AKA Europe. Normal business expansion in an increasingly borderless world? An attempt at creating Red Hat World Domination? This can be interpreted either way.

3 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. encryption export? by mcc · · Score: 4

    how will this affect Redhat's ability to include things like SSH, or other packages involving strong crypto, in european releases?

    they aren't allowed to ship those things outside the US now, right? so now will they be allowed to just send over the source code to the european offices and have _them_ compile the packages, thus circumventing the export controls?

    unless i'm really confused, this would be a _very_ interesting test of the "code-is-free-speech" waiver to the export controls. An american country publishing open source software with strong crypto through a branch located outside the US.. hmm

    -mcc-baka

    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
  2. No problem, as long as they publish sources by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5
    Red Hat has a history of publishing source, heeding free software licenses, and being nice to the developer community. Let's assume they will continue to do that, and will thus publish their internationalization work so that others can make use of it in competing products. What, then, do we have to lose from this? Not much, as far as I can tell.

    If we go beyond the things that probably aren't going to go wrong, we have one fear - that Red Hat may achieve name recognition and brand loyalty elsewhere, as it has in the U.S.

    Pardon me if I don't throw a fit about this :-)

    Thanks

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:No problem, as long as they publish sources by Falsch+Freiheit · · Score: 4

      Red Hat has a history of publishing source, heeding free software licenses, and being nice to the developer community.

      And, to be fair, SuSE hasn't been as well known for doing this. In particular, YaST (a major component of SuSE) has a commercial license, which leaves the rest of SuSE, basically, commercially licensed.

      RedHat has a tendency to release what they've done under the GPL instead. (such as RPM) Heck, SuSE uses RPM, as well. In that way, RedHat has already helped SuSE out by releasing their work under the GPL.