Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 24, 2004 9:40 UTC (Thu) by philips (guest, #937) [Link]

I'm device driver developer and I have to keep an eye some amount of mail-lists to be on track.

What I have observed is the change in behaviour of RH engineers. In the beginning they were very communicative, responsive. But couple of years ago was a change. It like something have been broken. It was time when KDE guy departed RH party, when Alan Cox took "vacations." After that was announcment of RHL line of products end.

RHL death is absolutely Ok for me. It was my personal opinion that RH can make money by being more concentrated on customers' needs. But those time they have touted that they do not want to go off open-source trail: customer stuff most of the time proprietary/internal/whatever to customer.

But they resisted. They wanted some sort of open-source purity for RHL. they were idealists.

And then something got broken.

RHL death is just peak of iceberg. RH engineers stopped listening in discussions and were dumping some out-of-discussion data on you making conclusion that you understand nothing and anyway everything already decided without you. As if they just have left brain-washing meeting with they management.

Something really really went very broken.

I've being communicating with MySQL guys for about one year. MySQL is proprietary too. But MySQL people (especially Monty ;) are really nice to talk: they will listen you, will try to help you to understand why you are wrong or why MySQL do not do what I need, or after all how to do it better with MySQL.

RedHat? Check Fedora lists, GNOME lists, GCC lists, glibc lists. This people are really behind some kind of wall right now...