[nflug] community GNU/Linux education - thank you

David W. Aquilina david at starkindler.us
Tue Jan 24 22:58:00 EST 2006


On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 10:32:29PM -0500, peter at thecybersource.com wrote:
> 2. How is Microsoft different than RedHat (Fedora Project). They are
> both publicly traded companies with an obligation to their stock
> holders. RedHat created a very innovative idea with Fedora, a public
> beta forum to test new software in the waters of users. 

Before I address the comment above, I want to stress that all "standard" disclaimers apply - I'm only speaking for myself, not for my employer. All opinions have always been my own, and from this e-mail address will always be. Now that that's out of the way... 

Red Hat *is* different than Microsoft in that they give a lot back to the community. Take, for example, the number of contributions to the kernel, to glibc, and GNOME, to name a few. A partial - though still incomplete list - can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions. Many of these items (for example, GNOME and Xorg) are even used by Red Hat's competitors such as Sun and Novell. 

More telling, they also contribute to projects which they don't commercialize at all. The best example is the One Laptop Per Child project - hardly any monetary gain there, yet they're contributing in a big way to it. 

I don't think it's too hard to see that with Red Hat and Fedora it's not just about money, it's about the community as well. 

-- 
David W. Aquilina
david at starkindler.us
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