ARTICLE: Red Hat launching Linux subscription services network

[Kevin Buettner]

On Sep 26,  6:35pm, Craig White wrote:

> all the debian devotees round here...I thought this would be heresy.
> 
> I actually agree but recognize that it's a thin line between love & hate.

You have to look at the big picture.

Red Hat wants to be profitable, and to be so, they're going after a
substantially different market segment than the folks that the Debian
distribution appeals to.  Red Hat is attempting to build a reputable
brand that the enterprise customer feels comfortable with.  Debian
is a good distribution, but its community based organization probably
doesn't give the corporate IT customer the same warm fuzzies the
way that a company like Red Hat does.

So, for Linux to really become pervasive, it needs folks like Red Hat
to provide training, support, etc.  Red Hat does other things too. 
One of the things they're working on is embedded Linux.  Red Hat
(thanks to the Cygnus acquisition) also employs the majority of the
GNU toolchain engineers (GCC, GDB, binutils, etc.) The work that Red
Hat does on embedded Linux, on the GNU toolchain, and even on the core
of Linux (OS and kernel) does benefit other distributions like Debian. 
How?  Remember, it's all open source (most of it GPL), so any changes
that Red Hat makes are fed back into the sources used by other
distributions too.  So, to a large degree, what's good for Red Hat is
good for Debian.  And vice versa.

Some folks worry about Red Hat's committment to open source.  I will
try to allay those fears.  Red Hat is absolutely committed to open
source.  The former Cygnus organization had a really major closed
source project that was intended to become the bread and butter for
the company (prior to the acquisition).  Shortly after Red Hat
acquired Cygnus, this project was killed even though it was still a
viable project and even though Cygnus had sunk *a lot* of money into
it.  The reason it was killed?  It wasn't open source; nor could it be
easily made so since it relied on proprietary libraries.  Also, Red
Hat has opened up previously closed projects like Source Navigator. 
Red Hat is working to open up other previously proprietary Cygnus
projects as well.

Remember who the enemy is.  For you Debian fans, it's not Red Hat. 
Nor the other way around.  This is something that all of us should
keep in mind when posting to this list.  When a distribution does
something really bone-headed, it's okay to crticize, but make sure that
it's constructive.  Also, if you really want to make sure that the
distribution in question improves, you should let Red Hat, or the
Debian maintainers, etc. know about the problems that you see.  If
no one reports the bugs, they won't be fixed!

Kevin