[CentOS-devel] Balancing the needs around the RHEL platform

Wed Dec 23 19:37:01 UTC 2020
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On Wed, 23 Dec 2020 at 13:21, redbaronbrowser <
redbaronbrowser at protonmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, December 23, 2020 10:30 AM, Stephen John Smoogen <
> smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Red Baron Browser.. [you had me at the name since I helped come up with
> it 24 years ago]
>
>
> Did it have anything to do with Peanuts/Snoopy?
>
>
Only in the sense that the company I worked for at the time (Spyglass Inc)
wrote custom browsers for companies like IBM, Microsoft (hello Internet
Explorer 1.2/2.0), Oracle, and various ISPs. Each of those browsers were
usually named by the vendor as Spyglass basically sold the basic parts as
Enhanced Mosaic. We asked what Red Hat wanted to call it and I believe
Donnie Barnes said "whatever you want." So we went looking for a red themed
name and through a lot out. [Red Bear since someone thought Linux and GPL
was communist was actually the one going ahead. At this point two
fortuitous items came in.. the microwaved pizza was Red Barons and the TV
was playing a Peanuts episode for some of the kids of staff. Tada.. naming
slapped in on the build and sent to meet 4.0 extras.



> Is there anything you can do to bring back the browser and Redneck i18n
> support?
>
>
Not a thing. Red Baron's source code was owned by Spyglass which was bought
by WebTV and then bought by... The code for Linux was terrible because
Linux was the only X11 whose primary color distribution was 16bit versus 8
or 24bit like the others. This meant that the browser didn't work correctly
in that until after 4.2 was shipped. Spyglass management thought of this
and the Javascript support licensed from Microsoft (via IBM) were upgrades
and Red Hat had them as early bug reports.

Redneck i18n work was done by Donnie Barnes partially as a dare and
partially that the other language translations were taking longer than they
could wait, and anyone could do the work themselves to add another one.
However no one has done so in the years since because it does take a lot of
work to do it without making it 'crap'.


> The insanity of CentOS 8 having a EOL date 2.5 years before CentOS 7 would
> be easier to handle if it at least came with a "Reckon So" agreement button.
>
> I have reached maximum email parsing and am not sure I can follow where
> you were going from here. I am clipping here as I am EBRAINFULL.
>
>
> Which parts got included and left out of the history won't make sense
> until you get to the end.
>


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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