[Gllug] Linuxemporium - Pink Tie

[rich at annexia.org]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 03:59:31PM +0000, Jason Clifford wrote:
> And loose almost all of the developers and package maintainers without 
> whom there is no Debian distribution.
> 
> Red Hat do indeed hold that all software released as part of "Red Hat 
> Linux" is under an open source license however there are other parts of 
> their business where they have significantly relaxed that policy.
> 
> Personally I think that the shift in senior management focus at Red Hat is 
> indicative of a move towards a less Free Red Hat over the coming couple of 
> years. That is a natural result of their being a listed company now - 
> theyy are obliged in law to maximise share holder value.

I've only been working at RH for about 3 months, and I'm a pretty
junior minion, not exposed to the decision processes of senior
management, BUT ... I must defend the company by saying that I am
constantly surprised by the level of commitment to open source
ideals that people in the company at senior levels show. Managers
that I speak with are constantly saying that open source comes
first in all work that we do - even to the point where I'm convinced
that one contract was lost because the customer wanted exclusive
rights to the IP of some basic work-for-hire development, but sales
tried to persuade them that this software should be OSS. (In that
situation, I personally would have taken the money & done the work).
This attitude comes from the top.

Now, as I said, I'm not involved with the thought processes of
senior management, but I have never, once heard senior management
being anything other than totally committed to OSS. Not in emails
nor in presentations have I ever heard one of them saying 'well, we'd
like to be committed to OSS, but .. market realities, etc.' As I
said, this goes a long way beyond what _I_ would do in this situation,
particularly given the serious market pressures all computer companies
are under.

I know that some people who redistributed RH software received some
legal missives about use of the trademark, and that's obviously a big
PR blunder. But it's wrong to equate that with some doom-and-gloom
about how RH's "new" management are going to maximise shareholder
value in the short term by producing a non-free distribution or
whatever. There is just no evidence that this is the case.

Having said all that, I run RH & Debian at home, and wish all of
the Linux distributions a long and diverse (but compatible!) life.

Rich.

PS. The opinions above don't reflect those of my employer (except
obviously they do :-)

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj

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