On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 2:15 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
I'm having some problems with the way the conversation is going. RedHat *was* a company; to me, the RHEL was aimed as a wedge, to get into corporate America. For that matter, who started offering their distro of RHEL around then? Why, the same company that offered this new o/s on their brand new product, the IBM PC in 1980: IBM.
I see it this way. Red Hat tried to get into the retail desktop market, with some limited success. They were basically selling the media, CD and books. That market dried up when high speed Internet became more common -- everyone could download and burn their own CDs. So they reinvented themselves. Whether that was a good or bad decision for the community, their focus on the corporate market seems to have paid off for them. And, honestly, it appears to have worked out pretty well for others who use SL or CentOS, or one of the many products based on CentOS (like most of the open VOIP switches and ClearBox, Blue Onyx, etc.).