Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Sat 16th Aug 2008 01:04 UTC, submitted by sharkscott
"In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other's shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer's built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework."
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Member since:
2005-09-27
And what's your arbitrary reason for declaring Red Hat, Novell, IBM and others not part of the community? They certainly don't act as a monolithic bloc, but each follow their own interests. One interest they all share is in being part of the Linux community.
Disparate entities contributing to a common cause sounds like a community to me.
Not really. There was that legal issues about BSD and its source back in the early days of Linux. So marketing Unix and making your one flavor was risky. Linux was close enough to Unix (as far as most users are concerned) To make it a safe alternative (legally).
IBM got swindled by Microsoft on OS/2 so they wanted to get back at them. Linux was a viable alternative as they can accept and use without huge legal hurtles or spending money, without the risk at the time of using BSD code (which they used for their version of UNIX, but to much licencsing and legal issues to give away at a low cost, as well compared with Linux at the time it was far more complex)
As for RedHat they figured if they can smooth out getting Linux to work and give good defaults and tools preinstalled as a CD (As most people only had 14.4k - 28.8k modems, and downloading 600mb took around a week to download) And still without the legal hurtles that BSD offered it made it an easy way to make money. Vs. spending years developing your own version.