Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope

Brainsur writes "ZDNet reports about Redhat : European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act. While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism, the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community."

I disagree...

means striking pleasing postures for the investment community

I disagree completely. What it means is that you need to do right by your investors, not the investing community in general. If you're an open-source based company, your investors should realize that, and, if they are unhappy with the way you are treating your company, they have the option of selling it, or trying to force a hostile takeover.

An open-source company has to keep it's reputation, and it's actions towards the community as it's most important goal, because teamwork requires goodwill. The problem comes with all of the investment companies who buy into Redhat not because of who they are, but because of how much money people think they can make them. (It should be a little of both.)

Once that is accomplished, the rest should fall into place. The attitudes and actions of the company should determine the value of the company. It shouldn't be the other way around.

Re:I disagree...

Far too many people strive to maximize profits in the present, while neglecting the risk that their actions might cause a disruption in the slow-but-steady cash flow they already have.

Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to "the community" for no direct financial reward in order for them to have the credit in the community to get the development they need in the future.

It's truely a balancing act. Give away too much and you give away the store, but give away too little and people who you aren't paying will stop doing your work for you...

Translation: Open Source is not free

> Profiting off of Open Source requires that a
> business must sometimes give valuable IP back to
> "the community" for no direct financial reward in
> order for them to have the credit in the community
> to get the development they need in the future.

In other words, you want to use Open Source, you must "pay" the price in development effort. Or else. I don't know about you, but I prefer traditional business contracts with the price clearly stated upfront instead of this nebulous "you must contribute" obligation where you can always be accused of "not pulling your load". Of course, most companies do not sell their source code, as I am sure at least one hundred replies to this post will indignantly point out, but that is not the issue here: my complaint is about honesty. If you want to call your software "free" (as in beer), you better damn stand by that and not arrogantly state that "Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to the community". I have no problem with those who require payment for their work, be it money or development effort, but you better state that before "giving away" your software, and you better not be calling it "free" (that last one for you, GPL!). In the business world, such practices are called bait-and-switch, and are illegal. Of course, on Slashdot, any Open Source criticism is flamebait, so I guess I am just wasting karma points...

Re:Translation: Open Source is not free

Apart from the fact that your deliberatly imposing free (as in beer) upon licensces explicitly stating free (as in speech), let's look at the moral "requirement to contribute".

If you feel that there is such a requirement, pay back the community by paying someone who will pay back the community in code.

Buying RedHat (or SuSE, etc.) will fund the companies that currently hire programmers to work on Linux (and it's associated software suite). These companies don't hire these programmers out of altruisim, they do so because it's their team who's going to be struggling with the problems in debugging / integrating the applications.

It's remarkable that should you decide to take this mantle upon you own shoulders, you don't have to pay the price to them. But you will pay the price (internally), and if you feel that it's too great a burdon, I suggest you don't bother with software / computers at all.

Every action (and application) has a price, even those which are not purchased. The reason open source software will never die is because it's cheaper. You only pay the price of learning to live with the software you have, instead of first paying to get your hands on said software and then paying again to learn how to live with it.

Don't submit code back if it's not your cup of tea, just go out there and buy a copy from someone who does. If you feel no moral requirement to do this, then there's no reqirement at all. That's freedom, and it cuts both ways.

Cheers.

Hmmmm

I have mixed feelings about RedHat. One one hand, they were one of the first that set the Linux snowball rolling, and have given a lot to the OS comunity. On the other hand, their Linux distributions were subpar, even with the amount of support they offered. For a while options like SuSE have been much much better. Anyway, everyone is entitled to fuckups. I hope they get on their feet again and do better!

Re:Hmmmm

AAAAhhh, debian snob! ;)

I've used debian, so don't take this as an ignorant critism. I can't stand it. Yes, apt-x is cool, there is no middle ground. What if I want a semi-new package, but I don't want to crash my machine using it? Stable is a couple years stale already, unstable is just that, and testing says it all. That leaves me to compile from source, and if I'm going to do that, might as well use slack.

Package management under redhat/fedore has become much better. I don't often run into dependancy problems, and when I do, it's often because I'm trying to get an out of the way package that isn't in a yum repo. Which I can make myself, by the way, with little effort.

Debian maybe what all the cool kids use, but I'll take fedora or RHE when I need to get work done.

Re:Hmmmm

Wow -- you can't stand it?

I love it. I've been using it exclusively since 1998 or 1999. But i'm an odd one. I'm young but I have no interest in new stuff -- i just like stability and consistency.

I do use testing. I find it very stable. i used unstable for years. It worked for the most part. The only tricky times would be when major upgrades were happening -- new gnomes, or something like that.

I"m not snoby though. To each his or her own. I just prefer stability to anything. Debian gives me that.

But thank you for the info. I didn't know they'd gotten better. Maybe i'll try them on a extra computer if i come across one.

Re:Hmmmm

Unstable and Testing are the Debian categories, because they concentrate on having a rock-solid system, as opposed to running recent software.

Testing level packages are (if I remember correctly, it's been a while since I used straight debian), are what most other distro's have had on their install CD's. Recent, but not the latest versions of the software, and may or may not require upgrading.

Unstable is the latest versions available on the apt-repository. They havent been though the months and years of testing and the like that the debian guys put stuff through.

If you don't like how they do this, but you want to use apt, you can try one of the other Debian based distro's out there (I use libranet) which combine the ease of use of the APT system, but using recent releases of the software. And you can select the level that you want to download from (apt-get -t testing/unstable install packagename)so you can download whatever version you want.

The only time I've had a problem running apt, was actually just yesterday, when I was trying to use their precompiled 2.6.8 kernel package, and all that required to fix was rebooting and selecting the default 2.4.21 kernel.

Asiide from that, my system has been solid.

Re:Hmmmm

Aaahhhh, a Fedora snob! :)

Yes, apt-x is cool, there is no middle ground. What if I want a semi-new package, but I don't want to crash my machine using it? Stable is a couple years stale already, unstable is just that, and testing says it all. That leaves me to compile from source, and if I'm going to do that, might as well use slack.

Spoken by someone who clearly doesn't know Debian. This FUD is getting really old for a lot of us. I've been using Debian unstable for at least three *years* with only one catastrophic failure which I solved by booting off my "emergency boot disk" (a Knoppix CD) and reverting the package that caused the problem.

Unstable is constantly *CHANGING*, *not* constantly broken, that's what Debian means by "unstable". If you were more familar with Debian you would also know there *is* a middle ground and there is more to Debian than apt-get. There is aptitude and synaptic, which make it easy to more finely control the updates of your system, allowing you, for example, to only update the things you need and put the rest on hold, so you miss 95% of the minor problems that everyone suffers because they always run apt-get upgrade and update the world once or twice a day, when they probably don't *need* to have the latest and greatest of every package, and they are very unlikely to need it within 24 hours after its been released.

Bottom line: Using Debian Sid *responsibly* (update only what you need, and only once ever 7-10 days, not daily) is just as safe as using any other recently released distro. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many people like me doing it.

P.S.: Cool kids want to get work done too! :)

Best thing that Rad Hat did...

....was to piss me off enough to try SuSE and Gentoo.

Re:Best thing that Rad Hat did...

I often hear people bitching about Red Hat. Sometimes it gets old, bitching about Microsoft I suppose. Not enough bitching about Apple's elitism for damn sure...

I've used RedHat since 5.2, and now I run Fedora, I still have all the functionality and features of any other distro. I'm still not running Windoze. Still compile any kernel or source I need. Still not paying for my OS. And I'm willing to bet my systems are up and running from a blank hard drive a hell of lot quicker than those of the whiners.

RedHat has done more for linux that any company out there, go dig up some stats about which distros corporations are adopting (READ: REPLACING WINDOWS SERVERS) the most. With all due respect - you are *not* going to find Gentoo or Slackware on that list. Suse is still a distant second. Where will Linux hurt the pocketbook of M$ the most? Corporate America, that's where. I'm sorry, but as a linux protagonist, that is where my priorities lie - working on curing the disease that is Microsoft

Despite it's blunders - sociopolitical or otherwise - RedHat has done a LOT for linux and for that we owe them thanks if nothing else.

RedHat is not the enemy.

Explain the licensing,

I have yet to understand their licenses, I pay $349 pr. year to have a ES server connected to their update network or what?

Re:Explain the licensing,

You are paying (1) to get updates, (2) for their warranty protection, (3) for the right to get tech support from Red Hat and (4) for the (limited) right to use their trademarks on your computer with the software. If those are of no value to you, then don't renew the subscription -- I think all you need to do is edit out their logos and name.

Red Hat's business model is built around adding value to Linux. If none of that added value means anything to you, then don't buy it.

Strike a pose

the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community.

Who knew the secret ??? to profitability was Voguing.

Altruism...

While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism

I think this guy has it all wrong. The GPL isn't about altruism, it's about selfishness, and that's a good thing.

I must admit, I'm a bit cynical, and thus I have some trouble believing in altruism. I think Richard Stallman had a brilliant idea with the GPL. It was a way to turn the selfishness of every programmer, that desire to be able to look at how something was done, to both his advantage, and the advantage of people around the world.

What he's done is to create a system, whereby people with that programming itch (and you know what I mean if you've got it), will give away access to the product of their hearts and minds, just to be able to satisfy that itch when it comes to someone else's work, or someone else's improvements of their own work.

As a programmer, I think there can be no greater boon than to have people who want to use your software, and, even more so, people who want to see how it's written, and possibly improve it.

Operating System of Choice?

I manage serveral servers for a small sized ISP. Mod me down, but over the time since RedHat released their Enterprise line, I have felt that RedHat was going into the dark. People have become skeptical over their support schemes which they blatantly charge for. Their packages and applications have become too "closed" and again, somewhat dependent on RedHat Enterprise, period. We now prefer OpenBSD and FreeBSD over Linux. We call it simplicity over formality, not that it is all that is to it. Distributions like slackware or debian and the BSD flavors out there works just great and they are more flexible than RedHat Enterprise is. Besides, setting up and maintaining RedHat Enterprise is simply not much fun either!

Re:Operating System of Choice?

Well, what did you expect? Of course they "blatantly" charge (how else do you do it?) for their services. If you don't want them to be producing signed updates and such for your systems and don't need them to be able to take care of your systems, then don't use it! That doesn't make Red Hat "dark" or "evil".

There's way too much nonsense spouted about Red Hat. Some people see that they're making money (that usually means, performing a valuable service to society) and think that's somehow impure.

I applaud redhat for dropping the desktop

When I first tried Linux I started with redhat 5.0 and got a bad taste in my mouth toward linux at first. Things that really irked me personally were that every time I had to compile anything from source that I had to install a diffrent compiler from the get go. Seemed like they were always including some version of gcc that sucked. I dident care for the way that network interfaces were handled. RPM worked great for the redhat packages but for every 3rd party package it was dependancy hell as there always seemed to be some strange lib that was always needed but no reference to the package name! I applaud thier efforts but thier distro was definately not for the desktop. Of course I should shut up because I am now very pleased with using slackware on my servers and on the desktop. I know there are better distros for desktop linux but slackware is very easy to use for just what you want and nothing more. I can compile without having to replace gcc right off the bat and package management is easy any way you want to go. I wish them the best of luck and they are a great choice if you need support but if not there are better distros out there.

Rehat vs IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun

I think this is what it will boil down to:
Rehat vs. IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun

1) Sun's JavaDesktop [sun.com] is based on Suse Linux, and provides a very good mechanism for updates, for just one time cost of $50 (includes Star Office).
2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office.
3) IBM and Suse have been working with each other for a while. Especially in the Lotus Notes area.
4) Novell's new directory services can be used on Suse Linux.
5) Suse can be a cluster resource in the Novell Clustered environment.

Where does RedHat fit in this picture????

Re:Rehat vs IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun

Simple - Novell is not dumb enough to release the majority of their products as 'Suse only' They know RedHat has a huge installed base. Sure they want to build support for Suse distros - but if they go down the path of 'Suse or nothing' then I believe they will fail. In various discussions with Novell regarding Suse (I work in IT at an east cost university), they have been clear that RedHat Ent support for their stuff was important. I think the better context for the question you asked is - where are RedHat's value added services? Novell can give Suse away and still make money off the top level stuff - Novell services on Linux, edirectory, etc just like IBM does. You make the money of the commercial/enterprise apps. WHo cares if you make $10 on the base level OS package you run it on?

Re:Rehat vs IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun

I agree and I think it goes beyond this. Suse Linux is far more pragmatic than Red Hat. We stopped using Red Hat Linux for one simple reason; it doesn't include the software that we use everyday. Suse Linux comes out of the box with: a Java VM, Flash, an MP3 codec, Adobe Acrobat, Conectiva drivers for win modems, NVidia drivers installable through their admin tool, Yast, and the list goes on.

I think the difference is that Red Hat makes an open source Linux distribution and Novell makes a Linux distribution that solves people's problems today. Not all the software I want and need to use is open source. Red Hat wants us to either fork out a ton of cash to get the non-open source software we want and need or they want us to believe we're in this pipe dream thinking that what comes with Fedora is all we need.

Novell is already giving a lot to the open source community and they've proven they can develop enterprise software. Red Hat gives everything to the open source community and is trying to develop enterprise software. I am very pleased with the software Red Hat has produced but Novell has the better business model. Sure Novell might not make RMS happy but I don't pick my software on what makes one man happy. I pick my software on what will get the job done.

Holy .com mentality Bat Man!

...striking pleasing postures for the investment community.

Yeah, who needs customers so long as some chump is giving us venture capital!

Now order me up another one of those Aeromonto chairs and install a Pac Man in the executives washroom!

We do computers! The laws of economy do not apply!

Fires of altruism?

your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism

Redhat is competing with Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Suse (Novell) and dozens of other firms in the OS market and you're describing its big challenge as surviving the marketplace for altruism? I don't think Linus cooked up GNU/Linux just so it could be run on the machines of geeks for the benefit of other geeks. He must have known that when he tossed that source code out onto the Internet that there was no telling where it would end up. Redhat's focus must be the blue-white fires of the business computing marketplace or it will be as passe as the "Nifty Fifty" of the 1970's. Where are they now? Ever check out the list of the Dow Jones Industrial Average components in 1960 versus now? Today's Microsoft is tomorrow's Litton Industries or Penn Central Railroad. Compete or die.

If you want to look deep into the future for Microsoft, this site [microsith.com] tells all.

New frontiers in economics

Any business likes to create externalities, that is, it will pass costs on to others if it can. If the business can use free air and has a choice of cleaning it up or releasing it polluted, the obvious choice is to release the air polluted. It's cheaper and the profits are greater. The only restraint is usually the law. (although occasionally public pressure forces a business to behave.)

In the case of free software, we have the case where the environment bites back immediately. It immediately punishes 'pollution'. My hope is that Red Hat et al find business models that work. Perhaps these business models can then be translated to other industries. ie. Open source business models might show us how to protect the environment.

Certainly, open source proves that profit is not the only way to incentivise the creation of value. This is good because economic theory lately has been going in a rather bad direction in terms of protecting the environment and our liberties.

An example of this is medical research. Research used to be conducted like open source. Now most research is funded by drug companies. The result is that if a disease can't be profitably be treated with a drug, it will be ignored. Cures that are not drug based are ignored. There will be no research that proves that cancer can be cured for free. Serious economists are starting to realize that this is a bad thing.

In "The Success of Open Source", Steven Weber cites a variety of sources that prove that open source is a better way to produce many 'goods'.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I'm cheering for Red Hat (and Suse and Mandrake and Debian ...)

Well, their premise basically sucks.

The simple fact is that Debian is Linux. If you go look at Distro Watch you can plainly see that if you were to take Debian, Knoppix, DSL and Gentoo --which are all in the top ten-- all together as Debian you'd clearly have by far the biggest share of the distros and all of them are rising. There's no reason not to use Debian any more.
This certainly wasn't always true. When it was just Slackware, Debian and RedHat, RedHat was cool because RedHat was the only distro with a GUI installer, but those days are long gone.
Top it off with RedHat's screw the desktop user attitude and they don't really deserve any respect. Hey, if their attitude is take and no give then why should anybody care what happens to them. I put them right up there with Linspire. In a few years nobody will even remember who they were.

Red Hat seems to have an attitude problem.

With developers like this [redhat.com], who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.

rh does good, but....

they kinda shot themselves in the foot by killing the free server-level product. fedora is not enterprise-level server stuff. hey, how handy, they have an entreprise product!....but it's expensive and there's no way to try it out without buying it. It's kind of hard to tell my management that linux is cheap when I need to ask him for a purchase order for RH Enterprise. We can afford it, because we're pretty big...but hell, we can afford FreeBSD and Solaris and Debian for the cost of a CDR and some bandwidth.

altruism, my ass

the white-hot fires of online altruism

I don't think so. Linux was forged in the 'white-hot fires of online self-interest'; altruism had nothing to do with it. The payoff was different things to different people, and since an easy concept like money wasn't involved a good many folks have a difficult time understanding and instead use the catch-all 'altruism' to explain it. Here are a few of the payoffs:

(1) Reciprocal contribution. Contribute code to a work and you encourage others to do the same. Whether you understand it on a conscious level or not the end result is a product that works better for EVERYONE involved. Everyone wins.

(2) 'Scratching the itch'. This certainly seems to be Linus's motivation for working on Linux. He does it because he enjoys it. He's stated, publicly, that he'd work on Linux even if no one else did. Linus's motivations, and the motivations of others like him, are no different than any other hobbyist: personal satisfaction. That's their 'coin'.

(3) Public recognition. Some coders code for kudos and respect.

(4) Practice and portfolio. Some folks work on open source projects to improve their skills AND their resume for jobs that pay money.

These are just some of the reasons I can list off the top of my head. But 'altruism' isn't a driving force for Linux development, and I seriously doubt that pure altruism (if there even is such a thing) accounts for the motivations of more than a tiny fraction of all coders.

Max

Not necessarily altruism ...

"... forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism ..." Okay, this might be nitpicking, but still ... Unless some developers out there really don't give a rip about their careers or their education, open source developers are working for themselves as much as anyone else. Working on an open source project means learning about the tools and techniques used in that project, plus being able to say "I worked on that project." If someone's just coding as a hobby, and they know everything there is to know, they're still getting enjoyment out of it -- unless we've got some monkish programmers out there ;-) If nothing else, open source is good for the free exchange of information. And Red Hat is smart for utilising the ambition of the open source movement.

RedHat Blues....

European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act

I know this is going to sound bad but I really believe that Fedora was a big mistake. The previous RedHat releases IMO were MUCH more stable by a long shot than any of the Fedora releases I've used. It feels like alpha software at time. I know people who have had great success with Fedora. For some reason I'm just not all that happy with the uptime.

In all fairness I believe it's probably not all that bad. My experience with it however hasn't been all that great. I've been with RedHat since 4.1 came out. Since Fedora I've switched to other distros including SuSE, Debian and Open/Free/Net BSD.

I'm hoping they will either fix it before releases are available for use or simply dump Fedora and go back to the good old days.

Yes, I've been told Fedora isn't what you should be using for production. In the past I haven't had any problems with production environments running RedHat 7, 8 or 9. Now I wouldn't trust anything to Fedora. I've spent months working with it in a test lab and chatting up a storm on the mail lists. ::sigh:: Sorry if this sounds like a bashing session. I really enjoyed RedHat in the past. Yes, I did purchase quite a number of AS 2.1 and 3.0 servers. I'm supporting them (in case anyone asks).

ISV lock-in spells end of meritocracy in linux

Red Hat isn't walking a tight rope. Clearly they have gone totally commercial in their interests. They are thrilled that all of the ISV's are certifying to RHEL. http://blogs.zdnet.com/index.php?p=364 It's also not a question of if Red Hat is good for open-source. Clearly they are. They use their market capitalization to buy code (Sistina..) and move it into the OSS world. Their marketing is purely based on the goodness of the GPL and the OSS model. They champion it relentlessly. The real question is one of distribution competition. Red Hat is cleary happy that its barriers against the other distributions are growing wildly. (Again pay attention to that zdnet link above) ...well so what right? The so what is the ultimate role we in the OSS world get to play. Are we going to be RHEL partner or pet? Will other distributions have a shot at the big-time, and at directing the Linux movement? If we are talking about using OSS applications it will remain a competition--but here is the catch. RHEL is grabbing all of the proprietary ISV certifications. They are not out to make money with the apache crowd anymore--they are hunting elephant with SAP, Oracle and the PeopleSofts of the world. They know if they can get all of the ISV's they will control most if not all of the real profits to be had in the Linux world, while their pets all scurry about helping them. 2 Final points. 1-Do the math on that quote about 4M per ISV. Red Hat claims 300 ISV's and 1k aps. If you multiply that cost to certify to RHEL out then ISVs have invested somewhere between 300M and 1.2B in their commitment to RHEL. Meaning it would take that much investment to move them all to Debian or some other competing distribution. Then consider SuSu was bought for only 200 million and you see how massive that barrier is. Scary. 2-They called Fedora the 'hobbyist' version. Give me a break! Red Hat spent the last 10 years convincing the world Linux was more than just an OS for hobbyists, and now they turn around and call their true OSS project just that. A RH sales-guy used the term several times in his pitch to me and I about lost it. So yes they love OSS and the GPL, its what allows them to make a 90% margin. But do they love competing with other distributions and welcome an ongoing and balanced meritocracy? I can't believe that anymore. Am I missing something here??? It doesn't look good.

shares

My shares in rhat [google.com]have been diving the past two weeks so maybe there is a campaign to undermine the company and what they stand for: open source? I am holding onto the shares and still searching for the root cause of the negitivity.

Let them make a little money.

Red Hat has in my opinion had alot to do with bringing Linux to the main-stream. It was my first nonwindows OS (5.1) :) and has alot of sentimental value.

What we have to understand and accept, is that while the core of linux and alot of good apps remain free, and that there will still be alot of free distros, a company has got to make money and do the whole corporate thing. This does have advantages, like getting commercial software, drivers, etc.

There are 2 issues here.
1) The life/death of "Open Source"
2) Having an OS of choice on one's comp.

Redhat has done much to improve both in the past. And at least they're not sueing us or shoving their os down our throughts and making us pay for it. (no names mentioned.)

While the core system and many apps will still be open source, I say let them make and sell a professional system, that may not be completly open source, but that has the potential of loosing the stigma of "garage OS" that linux seems to have. (by no means do i think that, but it is a myth that floats around.)

All I want is more drivers and software.
I want my linux games section back in Frys and gamestop. If Redhat has to sell its soul to The man, so be it. ( all you OSS zealots can install Gentoo )

Give and get; or don't; but be ready to be passed

This type of setup is nothing new, McDonnalds, for instance, has ronnald mcdonnald house, for helping families; you think there doing that because it was a contractual obligation, no. There doing it because it, indirectly, makes them money- the goodwill it generates twoards the company helps cause potential customers to get them instead of others when they want fast food. Open source is not a fast food joint, but simmilar rules apply, if a company wants to earn the goodwill that will cause it to be chosen over another company, it needs to establish that goodwill; with contributions to the community

Part of those contributions, as well as establishing some 'good will' to allow you to be chosen above others, also establishes your level of credibility; like it or not being an open source company is still 'wild west'- lots of fly by night opperations come in and say ther open source, install things, and disapear overnight, sometimes with horribly mismannaged instalations; if your contributing code/bug reports, or setup documents, then you establish a reputation for your coders abilities with that code; a reputation that will show up in google when potential employers are looking you up.

This is not in any way different from the traditional buisness world; if I am simply a company that sets up microsoft systems and administers them, or makes modules for microsoft products, I had best have something that makes me stand out from the crowd as an expert, this can take the form of making free microsoft utilities avalible to all for download, waiting for the few that will be interested in your other services (winzip), creating in depth manuals for use by those who want to do something interesting with there systems (again to attract them to your website to buy your real products), etc.

You don't HAVE to do this, and you can still suceed, if only temporarily; espically if no one else dose what you do, if your a company that deals with open source GIS systems and complete integration with electrical grids and existing setups (or something else very much needed and rather rare) and your very good at what you do, you can give nothing back to the comunity- the lack of 'goodwill' that would cause people to turn to you is irrelivant, your the only one offering that service, however, eventually someone else will come along, and give more back, generating that goodwill, and getting the free development/upgrads/purchases from users/potential customers that that goodwill generates; and they will eclipse you-
And guess what- this is almost exactly what is happeneing to windows; they give very littel back to the 'comunity', and therefore do not have the goodwill to attract the type of people who will simply donate there work: Linux may still be rather immature, but often people WANT to use it, because it's 'feel good software', the linux comunity; though the GPL, free distrobution of code, etc. has generated a great deal of goodwill that makes many people want to use it- even if it's not the best product for the job; and then they help it grow, so that it will be the best prodcut for the job- once again for that goodwill.

Side note:

It is of no co-incidence that many closed source companies are 'open-sourcing' a lot of there stuff now; it's for this goodwill effect: The EXACT same way that companies like Mc-Donnalds fund charities, but in computer and software terms.

Profits and IOS

than how do you eplxain them making profits and getting IPOs?

it snot thin air.. even MS is worried about theri tangible profits and winning strategy

Re:Translation: How do I make money from free stuf

The reality is that there is no money to be had. The open-source model is a poor basis on which to grow a company.

I disagree. I believe Red Hat makes quite a bit of their money from supporting their customers, than from just selling the software packages.

To most companies, the initial cost of software and hardware is not nearly as important as the long term support contract/plan. Many people thus choose Microsoft, because it provides support, while if you went with Debian, there is no support phone number to call when you run into problems.

And support is exactly why my ex-employer went with Red Hat, because he wanted to keep his x86 hardware, and also has the power of a UNIX system. I suggested using Slackware, because that's what I was running at the time, and he liked it. But after shopping around a bit, he decided to go with Red Hat because they provide support, and he is willing to pay $$$ for support.

Re:Debian vs Fedora

Why mod this to 0?

Debian is always good, stable, and apt, deselect etc really are great.

I have a couple of DEB boxes running, and they just run forever, oh so stable.

Linux needs Debian, and choices in general,

There is even room for the (slack, Gentoo) zealots.

CHeers

Re:social contract

The last thing I remember... was their Entripise filesystem. Before that being a big proponent of tieing together the Gnome and KDE interfaces *which many distros have followed suit* and being the first to implement it well (imho). They do contribute... but not everyone can innovate everyday.

What has Red Hat given to the Linux community?

Hmmmmm, let's see...

1. RPM [rpm.org]. Read the Linux Standards [linuxbase.org] Base documents?
2. Anaconda [redhat.com], the install/setup program.
3. Kudzu [redhat.com], the hardware detection system used by Knoppix [knopper.net] and others.

I could continue, but I think those three on their own more than justify the company's existence, if nothing else.
While I will admit that as an overall distribution I was not overly enamoured of Red Hat 9, RH have contributed solutions to a number of vexing problems for us, and also carry on a very active development effort at sources.redhat.com.
I'm also detecting some of the usual commie whining (No, I don't think OSS is communist, but this is) about a company that's daring to actually make a large profit here...as if every company purely by virtue of its existence had to inevitably emulate Microsoft's bad behaviour. However, it might behoove you next time to be a little more sure of your facts before you start bitching.

Re:social contract

Let's see.
They have many people daily working on the kernel.
They have many people daily working on glibc.
They have many people daily working on gtk.
They have many people daily working on gnome.
They have many people daily working on ...
>What is RedHat giving back to the Linux community on which it feeds?
They ARE a BIG part of the communty. Accept it.

Re:Debian vs Fedora

That sounds right to me. In fact, I believe that even explicitly said, a few times, that they never intended to allow Fedora to get really stable. It's intended as the place where they do the development for the stuff that's going to end up in the enterprise releases.

That said, I think that they should have made an initial release at the "testing" point rather than at the "unstable" point. But I'm fairly sure that they intend to make it as stable as debian's testing.