[plug] Red Hat becomes like M$

[Buddrige, David]

Maybe all this stuff flying around about Redhat has been kicked off by M$ in
some kind of backhanded FUD thing????

just dreaming up a good conspiracy... (wouldn't put it past them) - it just
seems to me that a lot of this talk about Redhat 
becoming like M$ has been kicked off by various journo's who have tended to
support M$, spectulating in public and
subsequently puttng the idea around, so that people then start thinking it
might be true - seems to me that it almost
becomes self-fulfilling (at least in terms of perceptions of redhat
anyway)... that's my observations anyway...

BTW, I use Redhat myself....

David Buddrige... 8-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Christian [SMTP:christian at global.net.au]
> Sent:	Friday, August 13, 1999 4:59 PM
> To:	plug at linux.org.au
> Subject:	Re: [plug] Red Hat becomes like M$
> 
> 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.