[Ilugc] Employee Agreement of a FOSS company
- From: sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rahul Sundaram)
- Date: Sat Dec 6 07:02:18 2008
Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
I was under the wrong impression that all Redhat did
was package code written by others - and am very impressed with the cygnus
story.
A large amount of code in any distribution in usually written by third
party developers and packaged by the distribution which primarily acts a
integration point more than anything else. Packaging is important
obviously but to consider Red Hat as just a packager wouldn't reflect
reality. To understand why, it helps to look at the underlying business
model and to bust another myth as well. Many people think that support
and services boils down to just hand holding (ie) teach someone how to
do "stuff" and then argue that if software is good (which it is), it
wouldn't require such hand holding. One example of such an argument is
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/12/02/2354248.shtml
However that isn't the only value. The cygnus story provides part of the
real answer. A lot of the code that goes into upstream projects these
days (esp the prominent components of the stack which really matter) is
driven by vendors who do it on behalf of the customers which includes
new features and bug fixes. As long as customers get what they want,
they don't really care about the fact that others can get it as well.
The fact that it is free and open source code, makes no real difference
from that perspective.
As a result of that, Red Hat is the single largest contributor to Linux,
Xorg and has developed and continues to maintain a large number of core
components including glibc, coreutils, GTK, D-Bus, HAL, NetworkManager,
PulseAudio, Avahi, PackageKit .. you get the idea. If not, take a look
at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
Suffice to say that regardless of any Linux distribution (or even other
unix/unix-like systems for that matter) you are using, you are relying
on very significant amount of code developed within Fedora by Red Hat
and others. None of this is of course, charity. It makes pretty good
business sense and yes it can be done with just free and open source
code without waiving the standard "Intellectual property" flag.
Rahul
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