[SLUG] Re: Red Hat slagging

[Angus Lees <gusl@nospam.cse.unsw.edu.au>]

On Sat, Jul 01, 2000 at 12:05:21PM +1000, David Sainty wrote:
> In my opinion Red Hat have made major contributions across the board:
> 
> - They have made real in-roads towards making "open source" and 
> "Linux" (more of) a house-hold name.
> 
> - They have advocated the adoption of open-source, put their money where
> their mouth was, and began doing back in 1994 what other now so-called
> "Linux" companies would have laughed at.

redhat have openly declared that they're at war with
microsoft. currently, the above points are their main method of
beating MS and growing their company.

i have no doubt that the current employees (and execs) of redhat have
good intentions (and i praise them for their efforts), but redhat is
now a public company and they have a _legal_ obligation to act in the
best interests of the shareholders. currently (while MS is still
winning) these goals coincide with those of free software.

but after?


> - They have demonstrated innovation and high technical competitence in
> many of the areas they have contributed. If their technology was so
> _crap_, why is it that the Mandrakes of the world "borrow" from them? -
> Last time I looked, there was still that uncanny resemblence.

its all about marketshare. redhat (and certainly .rpm) has a higher
use than the alternatives (at least in the US).



my main 3 gripes about redhat:

1. they are trying to imitate windows. the default desktop is a win95
lookalike, they have a "control panel", whenever rhlabs doesn't know
how to make a widget behave, they fire up the windows box in the
corner and copy it.  all these are understandable, given they are
trying to attract windows users - but i don't have to like it.

2. they write heaps of free software, but they don't use the bazaar
development method. all software development is kept in-house. until
very recently (since rawhide) even the distro itself wasn't
pre-released (and hence wasn't extensively tested). most of the
benefits (stability, etc) associated with free software come from the
development method, not the license itself.

3. they ignore licenses in the interests of more customers. they spent
all that rhetoric saying that kde was illegal to distribute, then
mandrake did it and redhat suddenly included kde in their distro,
without anything having changed. there are others examples too (eg: a
modified pine cannot be distributed as a binary).

(4. they don't call it GNU/Linux ;)  i used to complain about the "i
installed linux 6.0" logo choice too, but then i heard "my version of
linux is potato" and decided that the redhat one wasn't so bad ;)



but don't get me wrong, they're still better than caldera ;)

-- 
 - Gus
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