While I suspect I’d agree with much of what you say here, your tone negates any good observations you otherwise might have made. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t make them an idiot.

-ian

The -overly-broad- generalizations are like a political stump speech and contain the same kind of half-truths.

1. “They GPL everything they produce.”
The code is -worthless-. It’s like owning the fender of a car. You need the whole damn car to drive it. You ONLY get the whole car paying full-pop to red hat.

1a. “you carefully hide”
There’s nothing to carefully hide if you have a basic understanding of the implications of their strategy you would find you’ve made a complete ass of yourself. See #1.

2. “Fedora is completely Free as In Beer” ==False
Only a fool would run Fedora Core it on a production server. It’s too unstable for a desktop. It is -NOT- Red Hat Enterprise Server. Debian stable can and does run in production environments, and it is free as in beer.

3. “More on cutting edge….”
This is just mental masturbation. Please explain yourself.

4. “lack of a true developer community”
You are clearly talking out your ass. Please explain yourself.

5. “Red Hat’s current business model…”
It’s lock-in. Is Red Hat’s commercial software free? No. Debian? Yes.

Idiots like Joe Buck make my blood boil.

I started to respond here, but my response turned into a full blown blog entry: Am I a self-serving corporate flack?

-ian

To persuade anyone, you will have to carefully hide the fact that they GPL everything they produce, that they pay the salaries of many of the people that all the competing GNU/Linux distros depend on, and so forth, that their Fedora distribution is completely free-as-in-beer and more on the cutting edge than Debian is (despite all the problems with it and the lack of a true developer community).

Red Hat’s current business model is not “the old paradigm”; in many ways it is unprecedented. There are certainly external players (proprietary developers, rival companies, etc) that are dealing with Red Hat as if Red Hat is using the old Unix paradigm, and Red Hat certainly appears to be going along with that to the extent that it makes it easy to take away Sun’s business.

But the old Unix game was repeated attempts to create lock-in by trying to get developers to program to proprietary, non-Posix APIs, to fight reunification whereever it threatened to occur (e.g. start OSF when Sun and AT&T threatened to heal the USG/BSD split, OpenLook vs Motif, NeWS vs X, and on and on). Red Hat has pioneered a number of things for short-term competitive advantage (NPTL, well-integrated SELinux, etc) but then has put all that code out there for all its competitors to use. In fact, since almost everything appears in Fedora first, a fast-moving competitor could get it into production before Red Hat.

That’s not to say I’m entirely happy with Red Hat, particularly some of their marketing and sales people (who, like marketing droids elsewhere, will suggest things that are not true to make sales).