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Peter Stuge posted on Sat, 09 Aug 2014 10:34:58 +0200 as excerpted: |
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> Duncan wrote: |
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>> Red Hat is the gold standard, very long term commercial support, |
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>> IIRC 10 years, and very good community relations |
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> |
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> I've heard this on occasion, but reality is actually quite different. |
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> |
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> Red Hat is a software service provider. They do whatever their paying |
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> customers ask for. They do not take community relations very seriously |
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> in my experience. I believe it is the job of a single person. |
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I guess I was using a rather broader definition of "community relations" |
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than that. |
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Red Hat directly employs a decent number of people working on various |
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core Linux projects, benefiting not just Red Hat but the entire Linux and |
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often the entire FLOSS (BSDs, etc included) community. That's the sort |
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of "community relations" I had in mind, not just what one or more people |
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in a single RH department do. |
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I haven't actually counted all the upstream projects they either sponsor |
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monetarily and with conferences, etc, or directly contribute employees |
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to, but it's definitely non-trivial. Were Red Hat to disappear, a lot of |
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people would be looking for other employment and a lot of conferences |
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would be looking for other high-level sponsors. Not that they couldn't |
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find it, but it's certainly leave a big hole until things settled down, |
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that's for sure. |
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Take a look at the per-release LWN kernel activity statistics, for |
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instance. Red Hat is always ranked pretty high. I know they're also |
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involved in gnome and in systemd, and believe they're involved in various |
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other freedesktop.org projects as well. This is all community relations |
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and involvement, far ahead of what most other commercial distros provide, |
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and unlike say Ubuntu with its pretty-much Ubuntu-only Unity and Mir |
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projects (compare gnome3 and wayland), Red Hat apparently sees value in |
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working WITH the broader FLOSS community rather than going its own way. |
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In fact, their broad level of sponsorship within the community is |
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sometimes seen as driving Red Hat focus to the exclusion of other |
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distros, and indeed there may be a bit of truth to that, but compare the |
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Red Hat approach to that of Ubuntu with Mir and Unity, and I doubt you'll |
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find many wishing for more Ubuntus, while more Red Hats could only |
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benefit the community by broadening its focus and making it less |
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singularly Red Hat focused. |
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And they've always encouraged community-driven Red Hat clones as well, |
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even sponsoring CentOS now, along with Fedora, as I said earlier. |
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Compare that with say Oracle as a corporate parent and what they did to |
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the various projects they inherited from Sun, including OpenSolaris, |
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OpenOffice.org, MySQL... |
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I'm not saying Red Hat doesn't have corporate profit as a motive, but |
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unlike many other corporate "friends" where the saying about who needs |
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enemies with friends like that often rings true, Red Hat has anything but |
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the "embrace and extinguish" reputation various others have gotten over |
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the years. They really /do/ seem to "get it" that a healthy FLOSS |
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community really is in their best interest as well, and their actions, |
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sponsorships and direct employee paychecks continue to demonstrate it. |
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-- |
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Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. |
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- |
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and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman |
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