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Red Hat Has a Rocking Week
bgarcia writes "There is a PR Newswire story stating that Red Hat and RSA Security have signed an agreement to include RSA's BSAFE SSL software in Red Hat Linux Professional Edition." And Wired tells us Red Hat is coming out with with a new version that improves large system performance and speeds crash recovery. (Click below for more)
Plus, earlier this week we read about the e-commerce product they're working on with Oracle and their rumored Cygnus acquisition. Hot stuff, especially for corporate Linux users.
It looks like Red Hat is back on track, doing great Linux stuff, instead of fooling around with peripheral things like their Linux version of MSNBC (with Salon, The Industry Standard, and The Register jointly playing NBC).
According to a friend of mine who dabbles in the stock market, Red Hat's stock is up nicely as a result of their decision to go back to doing more of what they do best: improving Linux and extending its marketability.
Mazeltov!
These are crucial times for Redhat. I'm glad to see they are using the newfound $$$ to address the needs that many Fortune 500 Co.'s see as important for a commercial server.
I am currently reading a book called "Insanely Great" by Steven Levy. The book takes a look at Apple in the early days, and the development of the Macintosh. One of the issues it talks about is the changes Apple went through after they went public.
Many suits and professional manegement types were brought in to deal with the needs of a rapidly growing company. This of course clashed with the free-flowing free-spirit atmosphere that Apple started with. Creativity doesn't always mix well with Suits and endless meetings and paperwork. (One could make the point this was part of the downward slide of Netscape.)
IMHO this is probably something RedHat is dealing with now. I would be interested in hearing from some employees at RedHat about how this transition is going. What is the atmosphere like ?
Something just doesn't sit right between BSAFE and I.
Ever since RSA insisted that PGP not use its independantly developed implementations of public key technology, and rather switch to the RSA codebase, I've been unable to trust BSAFE.
After all--we know the design justifications behind everything in the original version of PGP, and the various algorithms contained with SSLeay. I can't imagine how I could ever have the same kind of faith in a company whose very existence is dependant upon the agencies whose primary agenda is to stifle the spread of encryption technologies.
Protocols are proved by unique implementations--just ask NASA, which has multiple unique implementations of all critical systems, so a major bug in one doesn't cause the primary mission to fail. That RSA Inc. specifically tries to suppress unique implementations tells me that any software based on their code is unproved.
That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
We're definitely including ext3, and experimenting with ReiserFS.
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