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Is this "backlash" real, and should it be?
Red Hat is certainly the Linux distributor with the highest profile and the most evident success. But success does not make a monopoly. To justify charges like this, it is necessary to point out where Red Hat has tried to use its strong market position to force out competitors and extract monopoly prices from its customers. So let's look at a few things from Red Hat's record:
This is not the sort of behavior that one normally expects to see coming out of Redmond.
Anybody wanting to criticize Red Hat need not look too far. It would be nice if the company had supported the Linux Professional Institute rather than creating its own certification program. The company's software patent policy is not to everybody's liking. Red Hat has pushed its users toward bleeding-edge versions of gcc while providing (and requiring) ancient versions of Python. They have blown a couple of attempts at coordinated, multi-distributor security updates with too-early releases. And so on.
Complaints like these, however, show only that Red Hat is not perfect. But every free software user has benefitted greatly from Red Hat's work, and will continue to do so, whether or not they have ever bought anything from Red Hat. Linux users are not suffering under the yoke of some Red Hat monopoly, and it is difficult to see how such a monopoly could develop anytime soon.
Charges that Red Hat is the next Microsoft look more like FUD designed to divide the Linux community against itself than like anything based in fact. Let's keep an eye on Red Hat - all free software companies can benefit from some vigilance to keep them honest. But let's not get taken in by people trying to create fears of a monopolist where none exists.
Prodigy, happily, did not choose the "pay them off and hope they go away" response; instead, the company fought the claim in court. And, on August 22, the company was vindicated: U.S. federal Judge Colleen McMahon dismissed the suit outright, ruling that there is no way that a jury could find that infringement had taken place. The company now known as BT has the right to appeal the ruling, but, one way or another, BT looks unlikely to prevail. We can continue to make links without writing checks to BT.
This result is a victory for the Web, but it is a limited victory. The judge has simply determined that this patent, filed in 1980, does not cover the technologies used on the web. Had the patent been written differently, the result could easily have been different. Other patents with claims on fundamental technologies will certainly surface in the coming years, and they will not all be so easily disposed of.
(See also: the text of the judgement, in PDF format).
We are, however, still without a credit card account we can use to sell subscriptions, which puts a bit of a damper on our plans. We're still working on that one. If any of you have experience with a merchant bank that is friendly toward online subscription services, we would sure appreciate any pointers you could send our way. We need to get this one solved, or it's all going to fall apart before too long.
We'll keep you posted as things happen; meanwhile, we're trying to keep the news coming as best we can. Thanks, yet again, for your support.
(Note that we didn't get any letters to the editor this week, so there is no letters page this time around).
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
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