[TriLUG] Who runs Red Hat and KDE

[Chris Hedemark]

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On Sunday, May 25, 2003, at 01:09 PM, karl thiele wrote:

> Just goes to show that RH is really a company interested in profits, 
> buy my upgrade every 6 months.

Whoah, wait a minute.  You can't begrudge them that.  Red Hat is *not* 
a non-profit org or anything.  They are a publicly traded company and 
*obligated* to make money for their shareholders.

Do I have some beefs with the methods that they use to achieve that 
goal?  Yeah, sure.  But I don't think it is appropriate at all to imply 
that their goal of making profit from their work is a bad thing.  As an 
enterprise customer, I don't think that they've been particularly 
interested in providing what I'm looking for in a Linux distro, or the 
service package that I'm after.  No biggy.  I talked about it with my 
account team, they don't have what I want, no biggy.  Next year we go 
somewhere else.  Freedom of choice is a good thing.  Obviously somebody 
likes what Red Hat is offering and they're doing well.  Good for them.  
Good for us.

> The people this hurts most are the individual who want to keep up with 
> the lastest but are not technical enough to do it on thier own and 
> rely on the distributions to provide upgrades. In this regard the 
> distributors are no different than any other software vendor, except 
> by GPL, they have to give it away for free and in source. I wonder how 
> they would do business if the GPL was not in place?

For the most part I think RH has been pretty good about keeping their 
stuff freely available.  They could play license games with their 
distro like Caldera, or not provide free ISO's like SuSE.  But I think 
they've actually got a very good track record on licensing.

- --

Chris Hedemark
UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X / Windows consulting available.  No job 
too small!
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