[Linux-Anyway] Fwd: RUSSELL PAVLICEK: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com,Wednesday, September 11, 2002
- From: Meph Istopheles <meph@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Linux-Anyway <Linux-Anyway@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 14:28:39 -0700 (PDT)
Forwarded in full -- without permission....
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RUSSELL PAVLICEK: "The Open Source" InfoWorld.com
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Wednesday, September 11, 2002
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RED-MOND HAT?
Posted September 6, 2002 01:01 PM Pacific Time
I GUESS IT'S that time again. About once every quarter, someone
circulates the story that the open-source world is cowering in
fear over the possibility that Red Hat may become the next
Microsoft.
Pardon me if I fail to cringe.
The fear is valid. After all, many organizations are rightfully
concerned that too much power in hands of a single company is a
bad thing. And, with the open-source world growing rapidly, it is
only prudent to be on the watch for a company with the potential
to overpower the market.
The problem is that Red Hat just does not fit the bill. It is in
no position to become a megalomanical dragon seeking to rule the
IT world.
When push comes to shove, Red Hat is a branded services company
rather than a software company. It delivers value to its
customers based on total solutions, not merely software CDs. And
although it delivers Red Hat-branded Linux CDs, it owns
comparatively little software on those CDs. Its real value is
bringing brand-name quality, organization, and services to
open-source software.
Because Red Hat does not own the software, the company cannot
"take the ball and go home." That is, it cannot suddenly declare
that it is making the operating system a closed-source solution
that is available solely from Red Hat.
Even if the company were to undertake the unthinkably stupid task
of forking the kernel to make a special Red Hat Linux -- a
boneheaded maneuver, unless you happen to have a huge development
staff and massive amounts of cash -- it would still have to
publish the source code, thanks to the GPL (General Public
License). So a new competitor could arise and challenge Red Hat
with its own code, if Red Hat were to become arrogant.
It pays to remember that Mandrake began life as a
meta-distribution of Red Hat. When Red Hat originally refused to
ship KDE (K Desktop Environment) due to licensing problems (which
have since been resolved), some people decided to take a
downloaded copy of Red Hat and to add KDE to it. The result was
Mandrake.
Now, Mandrake has gone its own direction and has become a popular
distribution in its own right, thanks in part to its emphasis on
Linux on the desktop. But it exists because Red Hat was slow to
fulfill a need of some customers, and the GPL and other
open-source licenses made all the critical code available to the
budding distribution.
Open source is a great platform for building business solutions,
but it is lousy for building empires. A Linux company can find
itself quickly facing new and viable competition should it
forsake the needs of the market and begin to travel down the path
of tyrannical domination.
Don't waste your time fearing Red Hat, especially because there
are some other companies in the IT world that seem far more
interested in controlling your IT infrastructure.
Russell Pavlicek is a contributing editor at InfoWorld. Contact
him at pavlicek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, or join his forum
http://www.infoworld.com/os .
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THE LATEST IN LINUX FROM INFOWORLD:
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* Open source icon Perens bids HP adieu
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* Microsoft's Allchin touts future of Windows server platform
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http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/09/06/020906hnallchin.xml?0911weli
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QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"By analyzing computers that have been compromised,
Microsoft has determined that these attacks do not
appear to exploit any new product-related security
vulnerabilities and do not appear to be viral or
worm-like in nature."
--From a Microsoft advisory, which says that hacker
attacks against computers running Windows 2000 most
likely were due to errors on the part of system
administrators.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/09/09/020909hnmshack.xml?0911weli
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