A new Red Hat beta and distribution changes

Posted Jul 21, 2003 15:59 UTC (Mon) by erat (guest, #21)
Parent article: A new Red Hat beta and distribution changes

It's good to see that they're finally making this move. They have a history of developing their own stuff in-house instead of throwing their weight behind existing projects (see: the two desktop systems they've developed on their own, their own web browser, their own fork of PostgreSQL, etc.) It can only help.

Now for some speculation.

Maintaining a Linux distribution costs a small fortune when done in a corporate environment where people expect to be paid. It's generally a loss leader, not bringing in enough revenue to sustain its maintenance, support, marketing, sales staff, etc. Linux folks refusing to pony up cash for CDs and/or support don't help either. As such, it's always the first thing board members and management look to cut when a company is hemmhoraging cash.

Red Hat may be a healthy company. What do I know? I no longer have any inside knowledge of the company since all my sources have moved on to greener pastures. However, I've worked in a Linux company before and have seen this kind of thing happen, not just in my company but in others that we worked with, and every time it's happened the reason behind it was the same...

I guess it boils down to this: if I'm right, it's put up or shut up time for Red Hat Linux users. It looks like Red Hat may be re-purposing its engineers and is expecting the free stuff to be maintained in a more free (as in beer) manner. This is not a bad thing, but those folks out there who use Red Hat without paying them dime one for any of their hard work had better consider supporting them one way or another, either by supporting their products in mail lists, buying CDs every now and then, or contributing to the distro with packaging, development, etc. It's how this whole Linux thing is supposed to work anyway, right?

Just my $0.02...