Red Hat Exec Takes Over Open Source Initiative 144
njcoder writes "CNet reports that Michael Tiemann, vice president of open-source affairs at Linux seller Red Hat and an OSI board member, has taken over from Russell Nelson as president pro tem. 'We thought that Michael would be a better president' Nelson said of the change, declining to share further details. Nelson will remain a board member and active in the group, he said."
I suppose (Score:4, Interesting)
Red Hat the new Microsoft of OSS? (Score:2, Interesting)
After all, Red Hat is the de facto standard of all open source. Intel's compilers, Oracle and everything corporate is designed for it. Good luck installing not to mention running anything like that on other distributions.
"Open Source" BogoTrademark (Score:2, Interesting)
Then there was discussion that the "definition" fo Open Source would be reduced to exclude certain Free Software licences.
For someone in charge of a branding effort all of this seemed a little rash. Perhaps internal dissent is what was going on behind the scenes.
Re:"Open Source" BogoTrademark (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair to Russ, that seemed to be part of a general corporatization agenda. The pressure to redefine open source was coming from HP through OSDL. A Red Hat guy running OSI is probably just another step along that road. Not saying that's good or bad, but it's what's happening.
Re:Russ has gotten some heat.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I knew Michael Tiemann in college (Score:4, Interesting)
You could tell early on he was going to go far. He had a microcomputer he had soldered together himself from components, and ran a prolog interpreter on. It was the first I ever saw prolog.
Funny little anecdote, I decided to try out photography after dropping out of Caltech, so Bruce lent me Michael's very expensive Canon A-1 SLR camera. It would accurately meter a thirty second exposure at night.
The photos on this page [geometricvisions.com] of my article Living with Schizoaffective Disorder [geometricvisions.com] were taken with Michael Tiemann's camera.
I've lost touch with them over the years though.
G++ bugs (Score:2, Interesting)
I signed it, too. (Score:4, Interesting)
-russ
Re:Russ has gotten some heat.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never met Russ, but after reading his blog I get the impression that he is someone I might like to know (and convince to think about what he writes a little while longer before he writes it), but he is far too outspoken to serve as a figurehead for an organization frequently targeted by professional PR flacks (e.g. Microsoft's.) I don't wish him any ill will, but I think he made the right choice here.
hypoxia (Score:2, Interesting)
Fedora is pitched as the beta testing project for Red Hat. Stuff that gets into Red Hat Enterprise is supposed to be proven in Fedora. If you look at the actual packages in each distribution, however, it is interesting to note that RHEL 4.0 actually has newer stuff than Fedora core 3. If Fedora leads to RHEL, how can this be? Has Red Hat, having jettisoned its community goodwill and developer support, been forced to fork RHEL in order to keep it current and supported? Could they be reducing the packages in RHEL in order to keep it supportable and current in what is a dying bid to tide the platform over until Fedora gets enough oxygen to live on its own, much less support the RHEL product? Is RHEL itself a smoke and mirrors operation - an unstable solution inferior even to Fedora that is part of a two pronged marketing operation to capitalize on the Red Hat name at the expense of the quality of their product? Is Fedora the true core of Red Hat, as directly indicated by Red Hat engineers commenting vociferously in the past couple of stories about this? Perhaps Red Hat has realized, as the air sucks slowly out of the room, that the best long term investment of dwindling oxygen supplies is to devote them to Fedora, because Fedora is the only hope for the future of the company. Certainly a closed linux distribution, forked from the roots of the original Red Hat Linux or Fedora, cannot be sustainable in the long term.
It looks like they wanted us to pull their gravy train for them by beta testing Fedora on our production systems and servers, and now that we haven't done it, they are cannibalizing their internal support and engineering resources to maintain what little momentum still exists in the Red Hat machine until they find the right Open Source affairs guy to get the Fedora engine to "kick in", as it were.
Sad.