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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope 199

Posted by michael from the walking-the-linux-plank dept.
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."
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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope More

Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope

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  • I disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:07AM (#10032247) Homepage Journal

    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... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:17AM (#10032300)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chemisor ( 97276 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:32AM (#10032391)
        > 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...
        • I don't know about you, but I prefer traditional business contracts with the price clearly stated upfront

          The price is clearly stated up front: it's $699. [sco.com] A bargain.
          • Again -- (from my other post) we need to deal with reality.

            The parent wants traditional business contracts.

            Times change. If you want to stay on top of the game in a competative market you need to change too.

            God I love Free Software!
        • Umm... I don't really know if I understand what you mean to say. I think what you are saying is that they say it's free but then expect something back.

          It is free -- you are not required to give anything back.

          And the balancing act is in providing free software while still staying a profitable business. That's called the free market. If giving back to the community will let you make more money -- then you should do it. If just taking software and never trying to give back and manage to cause people to not w

        • Re:Translation: Open Source is not free (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ebuck ( 585470 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @12:45PM (#10032789)
          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.
        • 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!).

          The software is free to use. The respect of the community (which for open source companies is still probably a prerequisite for profit) is not.
        • If you choose to use GPL'd work, then it is your contractual obligation to release modifications under the GPL.

          This isn't bait and switch. This isn't libre verse gratis. The GPL requires you to release your source to binary users if you are making a derivative of an existing GPL program. Anyone using Open Source should already know that before getting involved. There is no hidden clauses, for example a project owner can not demand extra stuff as long as you are obeying the license.

          Your post is very ignor
          • > If you choose to use GPL'd work, then it is your
            > contractual obligation to release modifications under the GPL.

            That is correct. But you are omitting the very important fact that the license does not require you to make any modifications as a condition for continued use. And also the fact that you are only required to release modifications under the GPL if you release the modifications at all.

            > sure the project owner can bitch all he wants
            > about a company legally using his project but
            > n
            • It sounds to me like you are complaining because the GPL is fair.

              Actually, you sound like a troll, but I'm not quite certain. You appear too intelligent to be a stupid as you are also appearing, though.

              The GPL was not created for the benefit of companies, it was created for the benefit of generous programmers. Companies can, if they are careful, profit from it anyway, but they are truly of secondary concern. It also wasn't created to allow ANYBODY to make money from it. But it also wasn't created to p
        • You are, of course, welcome to not participate, but as closed-source companies are finding, that's becoming an increasingly difficult prospect.

          On the one hand, you have a situation where your CUSTOMERS (and in the open source world, most of the time I find that it is your customers who contribute the most) do a great deal of the work of making themselves happy. On the other hand, you have the model where you have to do everything yourself.

          The problem is that this "free work" comes with a set of constraint
        • View the Open Source community as a trade guild. They regulate themselves ensuring a minimum level of quality for the product. They ensure a sort of "best practices" in the marketplace and they set a standard for the value of the product. In a more stringently regulated guild you might find the ugliness of price fixing and blackballing but in this case that can easily be minimized by choosing a different "community". You can work with Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, etc. and these are all different groups and cultu
          • The Open Source community is not like a trade guild. A trade guild is a real organization with explicitly stated rules and policies.

            If the day ever comes that the non-programming OSS users outnumber the nebulous OSS community, it won't even matter what the community thinks.
        • First- The license is not forcing you to 'pay' in the form of development effort, your customers/ 'unpaid programmers' (unpaid programmers refering to the code writers who were kind enough to license there code under the GPL) are.

          Second- This 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 compa

    • Re:I disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually I think that many companies don't have to keep their reputation in the open source community in mind. It seems that more and more companies realize that open source programmers are plentiful and frequently addicted to exposure. An example is the GPL rape by Sveasoft: Whenever the community uses the redistribution rights under the GPL, Sveasoft changes the license in an attempt to avoid giving back to the community. After the most recent confrontation, there are rumors that he will try and separate
      • What the open source community is to do is to ignore the desires of Sveasoft. To only develop the software that it wants to develop for it's own reasons.

        And to not even consider Seasoft. Why should anyone pay any attention to what they want?

        Sveasoft will then be able to leech as it chooses, but it won't cost the open source community anything.

        Philosophically the BSD license is the best ATTITUDE to take. The GPL license is a better strategy, but the BSD license is a better philosophy. If you combine t
      • While Sveasoft may be violating the 'spirit' of the GPL, they are not violating the wording- even Mr Stallman himself said that there method is perfectly acceptable, see here for some source information
        http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/SveaSoft [seattlewireless.net]

        Now, as I said- they may be violating the 'spirit' of the GPL with there littel double entamble there- Pay $50, get the source and the binary, share either (legally), loose the license to continue to get the source and the binary updates.

        But, there are pl
    • oh yeah -- and what is that freeipod thing? i don't feel like giving my email address out. have you used it? do you know it is worthwhile?

  • Hmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 )
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dalutong ( 260603 )
      I've been using GNU/Linux for a long time. I don't particularly love redhat in its current incarnation but I do have a place for them in my heart.

      Someone needed to figure out how to make this business profitable and RPMs did add something to the game. I never recommend Redhat now (I actually have a hard time recommending anything. I use debian but I don't recommend that to new users unless they are tech-savvy and serious. Have RPM distros gotten better? I couldn't stand the package management in the past.

      • Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

        by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:49AM (#10032500) Homepage
        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 (Score:4, Interesting)

          by dalutong ( 260603 ) <djtansey AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:55AM (#10032529)
          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 (Score:4, Informative)

          by bubkus_jones ( 561139 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @12:13PM (#10032635)
          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.
        • I guess you're not a developer, then, or else you'd probably have discovered that RedHat's "stable" releases are more broken than Debian's "testing" [xciv.org].

          Oh, and good luck compiling from source on your RedHat box. Say hello to RPM dependency hell!

          • Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Nevyn ( 5505 ) *

            I guess you're not a developer, then, or else you'd probably have discovered that

            Hahahaha. But whatever, I'm up for taking 5 minutes to do some simple troll killing.

            1. Rpm isn't perfect, but it's far better than you imply. It almost never crashes, and fixing an rpm DB is very painless.

            2. *shrug*, debian is at least as bad (I had to install xemacs from tarballs throught "potato" because the package was so broken). Plus you get

        • Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)

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

          What a load of crap (straw men), considering:
          * Woody (Stable) is used by many ISPs and other professional environments. You know why? Cause -unlike "the kids"- they want to get the job done. New software isn't very important; stability is far more important.
          * Sarge (Testing) is used by a bunch of desktop distributions. So what do you mean with "the name says it all" if it is stable enough for home users? So

        • Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

          by True Grit ( 739797 ) <edwcogburn@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday August 22, 2004 @02:56AM (#10036403)
          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! :)
      • Have RPM distros gotten better?

        Yes.. I use Mandrake and it has an excellent package manager (rpmdrake) built on top of urpmi.. It takes a bit of configuring, but once you set your package repositories up, it works great and resolves dependencies automagically.
        • wow. seems to be what everyone is saying. i doubt i'm going to stop using debian but maybe i should look into some other distros to recommend to others. (using debian is a religious issue for me. militantly free software.)
      • FYI, with the new CD installer (release candidate) and Synaptic, Debian is now just as easy to install and use as RedHat.

        I just switched from RedHat to Debian. What killed it for me was being forced to wipe and reinstall my system because RedHat needed to push some new release as a major release for marketing reasons. I wouldn't mind paying for support and putting up with RPM if they'd stop putting artificial hurdles in the way.
        • I just installed (just meaning I just opened mozilla-firefox) debian sarge on my new laptop. wow have they improved the installer!!!

          so you may very well be right. would be nice if a couple of config options were a little clearer for the newbies. i don't actually know if redhat's are.

      • I couldn't stand the package management in the past. Is it barable now?

        yum (YDL, RedHat), up2date (RedHat), urpm (Mandrake), YaST (SuSE) and Red Carpet (Ximian ?) is what is in common use for package management under RPM-distro today. They all basically cover the ground of apt relatively well. Keep in mind apt have been ported to the RPM package format; actually, this is what I use on my Fedora Core 2 machine. apt is still better on various aspect (mostly, it is faster), so people in the know tend to u

        • 2002 wasn't that long ago. my desktop has 1+ year uptime. i stopped playing around with distros in 1999.

          but thank you for the summary. it's good to know.

  • Best thing that Rad Hat did... (Score:3, Funny)

    by weekendgeek ( 711624 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:11AM (#10032267)
    ....was to piss me off enough to try SuSE and Gentoo.

    • Re:Best thing that Rad Hat did... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kortex ( 590172 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:40AM (#10032450)

      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.

  • Strike a pose (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:17AM (#10032301)
    the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community.

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

  • Altruism... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:17AM (#10032305) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re:Altruism... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 )
      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.

      Slightly OT, but you know, i always thought the very same. Not only that, but i feel programmers put more effort in making their sources easy to follow when they are open source

    • Re:Altruism... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dalutong ( 260603 )
      Interesting theory. I never thought of it this way.

      I _really_ agree with your statement that the greatest high for us is to see that our software is used by others. I don't have much released but whenever I do get feedback I feel great. It's not just programmers -- artists, musicians, authors. All people have that desire.

      I actually think that your representation is probably a better way to understand the success of Free Software. Altruism, in its purest sense, doesn't really work in reality. But it's not

    • Re:Altruism... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ebuck ( 585470 )
      Yes, he's totally skimming over the more imporatant issues.

      RedHat isn't out to save computing from Microsoft, the Spanish Inquisition, Sun, or any other perceived demon. RedHat is out to survive, and it's going to selfishly do so by nurturing the market which allows it to thrive. RedHat will never bleed itself dry, but they will offer up a few dollars (sacrificially) to keep the open source movement going.

      It's like fishers not overfishing so they have something to eat next year. Or farmers letting a fi
    • A very good point. It's kind of like a free market: every actor acts selfishly and for his own best benefit, and yet somehow that results in everyone being better off. This is as opposed to other systems (first-come, first-served, rationing, i.e. socialism) in which a few actors acting in their best benefit can screw everyone.

      Likewise with software. Acting in my best interest within the family of GPLed software, everyone is helped; acting in my best interest with other licenses, others may be helped or

  • Operating System of Choice? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by p0 ( 740290 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:33AM (#10032407)
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @12:29PM (#10032725)
      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.

      • 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.

        Totally. Everytime I read one of those posts, I have to say, "What the fuck?" Don't these people get it? It's like the pro-free-software version of the idiots who scream that, "Free software is COMMUNISIM!!! Y'all are buncha pinko, hippie COMMIES!" Free software is about making money for services rendered not abo
  • 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 s
    • You're comparing a distro from 8 years ago to todays slackware and think that means anything? Why people modded this up I have no idea. RH 5 was from 1997. I'm not going to bash slackware since I haven't used it since I think 7 or 8 (can't remember) But I will say that its major hurdle for me was doing everything by hand (editing makefiles). I have Fedora, want to know how many things I've installed from source? 3 everything else is in a repository that is a 'yum install' away. Including flash, java, mp3,

  • Rehat vs IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:38AM (#10032437) Homepage
    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????
    • 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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by heathm ( 174421 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @12:42PM (#10032774) Homepage
      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.
    • 2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office.

      Care to say what Novell have contributed to OpenOffice.org?
      In TLOC, Sun are up there at the top of most Linux distro's thanks to OpenOffice.org. This often gets forgotten when Sun-bashing around here.

      RedHat fits in, I think, because they're American, and it's "nice" to deal with a company based in the same country as yourself.


    • No. IBM and Sun are not going to want a clear winner. Its just that redhat is winning at the moment. Losing their edge as you mention but still ahead.

      The second it looks like Novell is going to come out ahead, you will see IBM and Sun favaoring redhat. Its that simple. Redhat got enough of the market to talk smack and .. got smacked.

      They dont want a MSFT in this ecosystem. They want competition. If say Sun buys redhat and novell (right), you will see IBM doing $50M investments in the next linux IPO

  • Holy .com mentality Bat Man! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:40AM (#10032451) Journal
    ...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? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mnmlst ( 599134 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:42AM (#10032465) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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.

      Why not? That's how MINIX was used, and Linux was originally intended as a replacement for the MINIX kernel.

  • New frontiers in economics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 21, 2004 @11:48AM (#10032494)
    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 ...)

  • Red Hat seems to have an attitude problem. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gendou ( 234091 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @02:26PM (#10033349) Homepage
    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.
  • 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
    • I agree that they shot themselves in the foot...but for me it's the killing of the boxed professional editions. I suppose that they could have just kept their boxed entry edition, and had people upgrade from freshrpm, but translating RawHide into Fedora, and expecting THAT to be a decent replacement???
      No thank you.

      • There is a "Professional Workstation" now for $109 I think. Check the website.
        • The "Professional Workstation" edition is a stripped down version of the regular enterprise edition. It's not a replacement of the prior Professional Edition, and, in fact, if you check their chart they say that a developer *should* choose to use Fedora.

          Fedora is just too flakey for me. I do have a Fedora Core 2 partiton, but I never use it because of misc. problems. (None of them are serious...or I haven't used it long enough to find a serious one, but it's little things, like the KDE menu editor not w

  • altruism, my ass (Score:4, Insightful)

    by maxpublic ( 450413 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @03:56PM (#10033806) Homepage
    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
  • 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 gre
  • 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

  • Give and get; or don't; but be ready to be passed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by strider_starslayer ( 730294 ) on Sunday August 22, 2004 @05:01AM (#10036729)
    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.

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