Bob Young leaves Red Hat [LWN.net]

Back in 1993, Bob Young created a company called "ACC Corporation," which, among other things, dealt in early Linux distributions. In 1995, ACC acquired Marc Ewing's Red Hat Linux distribution; the combined company was then named Red Hat software. Over the coming years, Red Hat would transform the Linux business environment, become the first Linux-related company to obtain big-name venture capital, and the first to go public. Regardless of how one feels about the company or its distribution, it is hard to deny that Red Hat has had a big influence on the Linux community as a whole.

On October 18, Red Hat announced that Bob Young had resigned from the company's board of directors, with the intent of spending more time on his other endeavor: Lulu.com. Bob's role in the company had been shrinking for years; he had not been involved in day-to-day management for some time. Still, when one thinks of the names involved with the early Red Hat (Marc Ewing, Donnie Barnes, Michael Johnson, Eric Troan, ...), it becomes clear that they have all moved on. Bob was the last of the crowd which helped to set new standards for Linux distributions and showed that it was possible to build a business around Linux.

Bob's vision was not always perfect - remember that Red Hat went public with a business plan stating that its Internet portal was the key to its future profitability. Still, he clearly got some things right. Seeking an example of how he saw things in the early days, your editor spent some time digging through his mailbox. What turned up was this message on how Red Hat chose Linux over BSD, sent to the free software business mailing list back in 1998. It makes an interesting read:

When we launched Red Hat Software, Inc, we planned to sell an operating system. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that being in the OS business meant that we were competing with Microsoft.

While our ambitions at the outset were quite limited, we can drink as much beer as anyone, and on those occasions when our natural intelligence was at its most limited, we'd speculate on what Microsoft's reaction would be when we became a real threat.

They concluded that a GPL-licensed system would not be as vulnerable to the famous "embrace and extend" strategy as a system covered by the BSD license. Were it not for the licensing issue (and a couple of others, mentioned in the message) and adequate supplies of beer, Bob and Marc might just have gone into business with "Red Hat BSD."

Bob has been well rewarded for his role in the creation of Red Hat - he still owns about 5% of the company, according to the proxy information sent out for last August's board election. Still, it is worth a moment to say "thanks, Bob." Linux would certainly have succeeded without Red Hat, but it would have been a different, and possibly slower, path to success.

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Yes, indeed

Posted Oct 31, 2005 14:55 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

I've said several times, most of them here, that for as fanatic as many people consider rms to be, some fanaticism, at the core, is pretty much non-optional.

Remember Tom Peters' favorite maxim: "There is no limit, I have learned, to what can be accomplished by a monomaniac with a mission."

I can't think of anyone else that describes better than rms.

You may not want to license your code under the GPL, and that's fine. But, IMNSHO, Linux and all that has followed on from it exists *precisely* because of the GPL, and me'at is off to the dyuke.