As if his promotion to chief technology officer weren’t demanding enough, Red Hat’s Brian Stevens must also lead a revolution of sorts. After all, open source is changing government, and Red Hat shoulders a good deal of that direction. Stevens sat down with GovernmentVAR senior editor Jill Aitoro to discuss what’s next for open source in government including Red Hat’s work on SELinux in partnership with NSA and open standards.
While I find it interesting that RedHat wants to get into the same space as Trusted Solaris, are they going to take the time (and money) to produce and certify a trusted version of Gnome or KDE? Replacing Trusted Solaris is not just about replacing the OS, but ensuring the functionality at the user level is similar. And considering Trusted Solaris has a GUI that is trusted (CDE), I do not think it will simply be a matter of replacing a SPARC or x86 box running TSOL with a RedHat Linux box and “calling it a day”.
These guys aren’t fooling anybody. When OSS advocates talk to government, it’s usually about establishing so-called “standards” that seek to exclude commercial solutions (ie. Sun, Microsoft, SCO).
“Here, drink this Kool-Aid and embrace ‘open standards’. You’ll really feel better about yourself and the world you live in. Damn those commercial guys. They have way too much money.”o
Red Hat is a commercial solution (just like Sun, Microsoft, etc), the difference is that their commercial solutions are based on free and open source software.
“the difference is that their commercial solutions are based on free and open source software.”
Exactly. Which is why Red Hat makes Microsoft look like an ethical saint.
I’ve got a new slogan for Red Hat:
Red Hat: Which volunteer open source programmer to we want to rip off and take advantage of today?
Sorry. I have serious ethical problems with a company like Red Hat that makes their CEOs and other officers rich by packaging up someone elses code in a pretty box and never sharing a dime of the profits with the volunteer OSS programmers that wrote the code.
RedHat is not in the software biz. They sell services around the software. They sell the trust their customers need for their infrastructure. Their custommers trust RedHat to deliver fixes for their problems and deliver consulting services when needed.
RedHat is not that different from any company delivering closed source solutions from Microsoft. The main difference is that they give their custommers more freedom and that major factor that RedHat them self can add what ever the custommer payes them to add. Custommer can ask for what ever and Redhat can deliver.
The source gives both their custommers and redhat itself advatages.
Anyone have to source to compete against redhat. But RedHat do have a lot of the best and most productive developers in open source. Who do you trust? The new company with some developers? Or the established company with the developers that actually made critical parts of the software you use? The RedHat developers made major parts of the most critical open source software.
> RedHat is not that different from any c
> company delivering closed source solutions from
> Microsoft.
They are *very* different. And the main difference is that ultimately, Microsoft’s programmers got paid for the code they wrote. The programmers that wrote a lot of the code Red Hat is using did not get paid. They got taken advantage of by an unethical company.
They are *very* different. And the main difference is that ultimately, Microsoft’s programmers got paid for the code they wrote.
So do Red Hat’s employees. You simply don’t understand how open source company model works.
The programmers that wrote a lot of the code Red Hat is using did not get paid. They got taken advantage of by an unethical company.
That’s where you got totally wrong. Ever head of license such as GPL/LGPL or modified BSD?
> So do Red Hat’s employees. You simply don’t
> understand how open source company model works.
I do understand how it works. Yeah, Red Hat’s employees get paid for the code they write. And the reality is that Red Hat employees contribute only a very small amount of code to Linux compared the overall amount of code that is in there.
> That’s where you got totally wrong. Ever head
> of license such as GPL/LGPL or modified BSD?
No, I do not have it totally wrong. Becuase this is entirely a matter of opinion. I consider it to be extremely unethical. And Red Hat is the primary reason I don’t write GPL code anymore (I used to a long time ago). If Debian packages up my code with their distribution, I don’t have a problem with it. But when Red Hat packages up my code, I do. Because I have better ways to spend the small amount of free time I have to do volunteer work, then by spending it on making sure Red Hat’s officers can buy that new Lexus.
Sorry. That’s just how I feel about it. It’s communism at its best. A few are getting rich off the profits of the many, and the many aren’t seening a dime for their work. And I don’t that is in the spirit of the GPL.
They are *very* different. And the main difference is that ultimately, Microsoft’s programmers got paid for the code they wrote. The programmers that wrote a lot of the code Red Hat is using did not get paid. They got taken advantage of by an unethical company.
As far as I know Red Hat doesn’t force anybody to release their software under any specific licence. If programmers for some reason choose to develop free code, why shouldn’t Red Hat be allowed to use the software along the lines of the developers intentions?
Besides, I guess most free/open source developers gets paid. They are hired by companies that develops the code to facilitate the sale of something else, e.g. hardware or services.
Further more, what Red Hat do, is to make sure that all the pieces of free software fits together to form a functioning OS. That is not a small task, and that is worh paying for.
If you don’t want to pay, they give back all their modifications to the community, and if the developer so sees fit, he can remove the Red Hat logos and references and republish it under a name of his own.
This is why we have free (as in both bear and speach) Red Hat clones like Centos.
The difference between Centos, or the individual developer of free software and Red Hat is that people trust them to fix problems when something goes wrong. Individual developer that manage to raise that trust from their customers will be able to charge their customers directly just like Red Hat.
Sorry, I have to disagree. When you develolp free software you usually do this for one of two reasons.
1) To create an infrastructure upon which you can add additional for pay services. In this case you usually use something like GPL to make the entry level for others as low as possible, or as an anti competitive measure.
2) To promote your skills, so that you can sell consulting services.
If Red Hat uses the code that means more marketing opportunities for the add on services or consulting.
If the developer releases the software using a free licensing policy, that means that other people are free to use it. It is no more unethical than not paying more taxes than you are legally required to do.
> Sorry. I have serious ethical problems with a company
> like Red Hat that makes their CEOs and other officers
> rich by packaging up someone elses code in a pretty box
> and never sharing a dime of the profits with the
> volunteer OSS programmers that wrote the code.
You have propably no idea about how much code Redhat has written and shared with the community, right?
Hint: it’s a lot.
> You have propably no idea about how much code
> Redhat has written and shared with the
> community, right?
Red herring argument. It’s irrelevant. Doesn’t change the fact that Red Hat’s officers are getting rich off code they didn’t write, didn’t buy, didn’t pay anyone to write, and that the people who did write it aren’t seeing a dime of those profits.
. Doesn’t change the fact that Red Hat’s officers are getting rich off code they didn’t write, didn’t buy, didn’t pay anyone to write, and that the people who did write it aren’t seeing a dime of those profits.
They got rich with services they make with customers then pay their employees or buy proprietary applications to release these code for open sources. Source codes are available online so anyone can use/modify under GPL license . Else, you wouldn’t have RHEL derived distros Scientific Linux, CentOS .
Not only they’ll probably do it (GNOME), but they’ll get help from Sun.
i heard europe was in talks for gov+opensource + security, with non-us solutions. (so no redhat, no suse (novell) and no selinux)
European government are incompetent, nationalist swine. They’ve taxed their ecomomies so heavily that they can no longer compete on the open market. They have to subsidize their own domestic companies in order to avoid bleeding euros to more efficient providers.
Against my better judgement, I’ll bite.
That’s a pretty large generalization you’re making. European governments? All of them?
Money talks. Throw as many European nations together as one can, and you have a lot of money. They move to OSS solutions, it doesn’t matter how overtaxed you feel the people are…that’s a lot of money being put toward OSS solutions rather than MS.
And that, my friend, is a good sign. Competition breeds development and innovation. A spirit we’re only beginning to rekindle after years of Monopoly.
Nordic social democratic countries are doing *very* whell. It can be argued that Norway can`t be used as a general example, but Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland are also doing extremely whell. They do not have oil and they are social democratic welfare states.
The nordic countries dominate the global lists for welfare, economy, living standards, and a lot more.
They are all socialistic democratic countries with focus on briding the gap between rich and poor.
Free education, free helth care, free roads, just justice system, and more.
Am I proud of beeing a social democrat? Yes!
Oh, and it is also a way for companies to drastically cut costs but yet not pass any of those cut costs onto the end user. Licensing for RHEL is over twice as expensive as licensing for Solaris, and it is even more expensive than Windows licensing. And yet RHEL’s costs are so much lower because better than half their programmers are working for free. The only people who benefit from Red Hat are the officers at the top of Red Hat. But average programmer / software engineer suffers. They suffer because of the fact that companies like Red Hat drive down the market value of software developers (while at the same time not passing on savings to its customers). They suffer from the fact that companies like Red Hat drive down the demand for software developers.
Yes, it is my opinion that Red Hat is completely abusing the system that GPL was intended to create. They are using it to set themselves up a communist heads of state. The vast majority of people are working for free, and only the people at the top are realizing any profits from that effort. THey are preying on the efforts of the community at large to line their own profits. It’s communist, and unethical in my opinion.
RHEL is free. It cost nothing.
RedHat sells services. That is what you pay for.
http://www.centos.org/ is RHEL for no money.
Here is more information about other distros based on RHEL: http://lwn.net/Articles/129698/
RedHat uses and makes free open source software. They use other peoples work and they let others use theirs.