Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Friday 03 June 2011 16:21:35 Les Mikesell wrote:
On 6/3/2011 8:57 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
<snip>
So what? Red Hat created a community by beeing free in both senses, and
then decided to go commercial at some point. And that hurt the feelings of some minor number of hard-nosed community members. Is that what you are talking about?
I was around at the time of Red Hat going commercial. I heard about that,
<snip> 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.
RedHat, at least, has not taken the path to the Dark Side, as the Other Company did....
mark
On 6/3/2011 2:15 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
So what? Red Hat created a community by beeing free in both senses, and
then decided to go commercial at some point. And that hurt the feelings of some minor number of hard-nosed community members. Is that what you are talking about?
I was around at the time of Red Hat going commercial. I heard about that,
<snip> 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.
Red Hat started with the concept of selling support services, and while they also sold boxed sets of software (a good thing back when most people didn't have the bandwidth to download it or CD burners), they did not restrict redistribution of the software or installing it on multiple machines.
RedHat, at least, has not taken the path to the Dark Side, as the Other Company did....
That's a matter of opinion, but not so much the point as our dependency on rebuild projects if we don't switch to something else.
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.).
-
Les Mikesell -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Ron Blizzard