Red Hat Deserves Award for ... Most Awards?

malacai pointed out a story on biz.yahoo.com about all the awards that Red Hat has been getting. Plus, their recent (pending) acquisition, Cygnus, also seems to be getting a wall's worth of plaques. Maybe we should think about giving Red Hat some kind of special award for "Most Awards Won by a Linux Company in 1999." One thing's for sure: Red Hat has done lots to promote Linux in general, and deserves strong applause for their efforts no matter which Linux distribution you personally prefer.

Comments

Red Hat have done very good things for us.

[Goonie]

They:

1. Produce a pretty good distribution.
2. Pay several important kernel hackers to work on the kernel.
3. Pay lots of people to work on GNOME, full time, and give the copyright of the core libraries to the FSF.
4. Developed RPM, which most of the other commercial distros use.
5. Have helped publicise Linux, and Open Source, more generally.
6. Despite some well-publicised problems, made quite a few hackers a tidy profit on their IPO.
7. AFAIK and IMHO, haven't abused their predominant position in the distro market.

While I don't use Redhat personally, I think that, so far, that they have been good for Open Source / free software, and that they deserve recognition and financial success.

Who Gives These Awards?

[CryoMax]

Let me preface this by saying that Red Hat HAS done a superb job in promoting Linux, making it pretty easy for the masses to obtain and install, and all that.

Let me then go on to express how tired I am of seeing companies get "awards" for being public. I installed Debian Linux back in '96ish, after a merely satisfactory experience with a copy of Slackware that came attached to the back cover of a book. At the time, I don't recall seeing Red Hat as an distribution, let alone one worthy of high praise.

Fast forward to current day. Red Hat is probably the biggest "name" in Linux distributions, but I think it's still debatable if it's the best distribution.

None of the three articles mentioned Debian or Slackware. Apparently in order to be an award-winning software product you actually have to be handled by a company that has a physical headquarters somewhere.

Perhaps the awards should be "Best Software Product From People Who Charge At Least A Little Bit Of Money". Is the problem that mass media (ie. the people writing these articles and giving out these "awards") only see as far as the complimentary review copies of software that land on their desks?

Remember when the PC Magazine "Editor's Choice" award actually MEANT something? If we give out these awards too freely, they lose meaning. Worse yet, we may attribute to them a negative connotation, bringing to mind images of corporate sell-out, clandestine agreements behind the scenes, kickbacks for the "promotional value"... And then where do we land?

--
If it's not important, you can probably find it in...

We need RedHat, like it or not

[Gurlia]

I know some slashdotters don't like RedHat because of its commercialism and what-not. But let's face it, people. Even if RedHat's not the best, even if other Linux distro's are more "pure" as far as open source software is concerned, we still need a company like RedHat. Why? Because the media attention and promotion of Linux caused by companies like Redhat is causing hardware vendors to start opening up specs to allow us to write drivers for.

Imagine a fearful picture of an MS-dominated world sometime in the would-have-been future, where not only we've Winmodems, but also Win-monitors, Win-keyboards, Win-harddrives, Win-CPUs... and all of them have proprietary interfaces which we cannot legally write GPL'd code for. Remember the "decommiditization of protocols" in the Halloween documents? We won't even have computers to run Linux on if that happened.

We gotta be grateful companies like Redhat came along and took Linux into the commercial world, so that, if nothing else, Linuxers are no longer an "insignificant niche" but a significant, thriving community. Even though I personally don't like RedHat Linux (I prefer Debian), they deserve a big "congratulations" from all of us.

Redhat is a Force For Good (TM)

[Uruk]

I've read quite a bit of flames about Redhat and about how they're becoming evil and all, and I was geniunely worried when they went public, because they went from a company that has a profit motive that is held among private citizens to a company that has a profit motive that is owned by the public. So far though, I think they're doing quite well.

It's not as if Bob Young and Co. just snickered to themselves, "Now that our evil IPO is complete, we can begin ruthlessly screwing the linux community muhahahahaha!!!!" but rather they kept doing the business that got them to where they are. And it's a good business. It employs poor hackers like me (disclaimer: "like" me. I don't work for redhat) and pays them to write free software. Now, I don't know how the rest of you coders out there feel, but for me that's tantamount to getting paid to drink guiness beer and watch the Simpsons. Maybe not as easy, but as enjoyable. I think you get the point.

The purpose of this was not to be a Redhat cheerleader, just to point out that if you really really want to, you can search the net and find a million places that endorse redhat (and I'm not talking about companies, but individuals) and talk about how much they do for the free software community, but the only place that I've really seen that *slams* redhat and calls them all of the filthy names that we tag onto companies we don't like is here on slashdot, either in the form of AC ranting, or in the form of off-the-cuff remarks about how they're growing into the role of the Linux Microsoft or whatever propaganda people are spouting these days.

Rob Malda, slashdot crew, and pos[t]ers, I'd like to see somebody write a coherent article about how redhat is supposedly evil and then defend it against coherent questions. Now, like I said, there have been numerous things written in favor of redhat, but nothing that really makes sense or has a reasonable logical flow that's been written against redhat. If they are evil, I'd like to see some concrete material on why. It's not inherently evil to buy another corp like Cygnus. It can be, but it isn't always.

I think the moral of the story with redhat is moral relativism. Nobody can point a finger at redhat and say "you did this, you did that" and claim that since microsoft has done the same thing in the past, redhat must be like microsoft. But rather, look at the current and long term impact of the action. It depends on the context and the affect of the action before somebody can come along and label it "evil".

Redhat makes a good product, plays nice with free software, (compared to you or your organization, what does YOUR free software output look like up against redhats?) and does all kinds of things for the community. Like the whole "letter" business. I've seen a lot of posters point out that they didn't have to do that, it wasn't even expected of them. But they took the time to do that.

I see redhat as not only contributing a lot, but occasionally holding out an olive branch to the ACs of the world by doing things it doesn't have to do. If you choose to throw it away and say they're evil anyway, just don't go getting quoted on large news outlet websites saying you represent the feeling of the community.

Re:Redhat is a Force For Good (TM)

[edhall]

...you can search the net and find a million places that endorse redhat (and I'm not talking about companies, but individuals) and talk about how much they do for the free software community, but the only place that I've really seen that *slams* redhat and calls them all of the filthy names that we tag onto companies we don't like is here on slashdot...

It's not just Slashdot. Ever since the IPO I've seen random potshots at RedHat as "The Next MicroSoft" on several technical mailing lists, including Linux-Kernel. Anti-RedHat sentiment isn't that rare among hackers. And though it's often seen as sour grapes, anti-capitalism, or whatever, I think that the dissatisfaction comes from another place. Hackers tend to be perfectionists when it comes to things they care about. I don't mean to over-generalize, here, but IMHO this is one of the reasons why open-source software works so well. Yet RedHat is far from perfect. No sucessful company is--there are far too many necessary compromises between the ideal and bringing a product to market in a timely way. The good is often the enemy of the best, and frequently its conqueror. So disagreement and dissatisfaction is inevitable--even people who are well aware of "the real world" issues will disagree on what compromises are necssary: how important time-to-market is, whether a bug is a major flaw or minor irritant,and so on. So even though I agree 100% that RedHat is, overall, a Good Thing, it's also important that we make ourselves heard when we think they are headed in the wrong direction. What we need to be careful about is not generating our own Linux-flavored FUD in the process. Vague fears and unfounded suspicions are better left unsaid. They won't help Linux or free software any more than they'll help RedHat. Well-founded criticism is fine, FUD is not.

-Ed

Re:Redhat is a Force For Good (TM)

[the eric conspiracy]

You stated the problem in your first paragraph.

"..a company that has a profit motive that is owned by the public."

I have heard the shareholder/profit motive as motivation chnage attitudes towards Open Source - to become the next Microsoft slam against RedHat so many times that it sounds like it must be fact.

RedHat only sold a small percentage of the company in the IPO.

Bob Young and the original founders still own something like 80% of the company stock. The same people that determined company policies before the IPO determine company policies now. Public ownership doesn't affect their ability to do what they want to in terms of open source one bit.

Hmm?

[whoop]

This news, on a day that RHAT has gone higher than ever before, closing at 168 15/16, up 25 from yesterday. Cobalt isn't doing too bad either.

Red Hat and i18n

[Michael K. Johnson]

Now would you please ADD some serious multilingual support fast?

I wanna be able to write, read Arabic and view web pages in that language!

As it happens, Owen Taylor, one of the GTK+ hackers and a Red Hat employee, is working on real multi-lingual support in Gtk, including proper right-to-left support. Right-to-left support isn't highly likely at the console any time soon, but I can't imagine monospace arabic lettering looking very good anyway... :-)

Proper multilingual support is most definitely one of the things that Red Hat is putting its people's time into. You might want to see the GNOME I18N information, and in particular, from that page, Owen Taylor's Internationalization in GTK+ whitepaper. To quote:

Future plans include suppport for the Unicode standard and languages written in a right-to-left direction.

Re:Congratulations

[elflord]

Hey I'd like to run a company where someone else does the work and I collect all of the money too.

This is unfair. Redhat contribute. They pay developers full time to work on GNOME, and their regular employees have contributed to GNOME as well ( see the credits ). Redhat are a company that gives back.

BTW, you don't have to wait for someone to "write a GPL'd product you can sell". You can sell any existing GPL product ( including the free part of Redhat's distribution ) -- read the license !