[plug] Red Hat becomes like M$

[Christian]

Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Bret Busby wrote:
> > The red cap has definitely succeeded in going the same way as M$. No doubt, it
> > intends to rival M$ in everything, including its corpoate philosophy.
> 
> What makes you say that? I've really not seen much evidence of Redhat
> acting in a way to harm the community. The recent fiasco with E*Trade was
> a shame, but it was just an unsuccessful attempt to give something back to
> the community - something which they certainly had no obligation to do.
> It's unfortunate that it didn't work out the way they planned it, but I am
> very impressed that they tried to do it in the first place.
> 
> Even as someone who would never use their distro, I have a great respect
> for the way Redhat has treated the rest of the Free Software world, and
> their history of staying (mostly) true to their roots and ideals,
> especially in the face of competition from companies like Caldera and
> SuSe who are not bound by the same moral ideals.

I'd just like to echo Greg's sentiments here.  I only used Red Hat (the
distribution) for a short while before moving on to Debian (and deciding
never to change back) but the active work done by Red Hat as a company
in supporting Free Software and the GPL is second to none.  When the
Qt/KDE licensing problem first cropped up, Red Hat committed money and
resources to funding a Free alternative.  Other distributors like SuSE
and Caldera simply started shipping the non-Free software.  Red Hat also
devotes resources to other important projects in the Free software
community and releases most (maybe all?) of their own work under the
GPL.  Perhaps I've missed something but I've never noticed Microsoft
doing this.

As for the link included in the article, all that says is they are
making lots of money on the stockmarket.  Like Oliver says, good on
them!  Nothing wrong with making money out of Free software and Red Hat
have shown pretty conclusively that it can be done without compromising
the ideals of GNU.

As I mentioned before, I didn't particularly like Red Hat the
distribution but Red Hat the company certainly has my vote and it gets
very old very quickly when ill-informed people start spouting off with
stupid, snide remarks about a company that actually puts its money where
its mouth is when it comes to Free software, morality and community.

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.