On Red Hat Bashing...

Miguel de Icaza , GNOME Guru, and candidate for most hyper human being in the history of humans being, has written an essay discussing Red Hat and the beating that they have taken within the Linux Community. This is worth a read.

The following was written by GNOME Guy, Slashdot Reader and pure energy beam, Miguel de Icaza

Recently many people have criticized Red Hat from many points of view, and during the construction of their arguments, they have ignored a lot of the work that Red Hat has given back to the community. Having personal friends at Red Hat and having talked to them in the past has given me a wider perspective on what actually is going on at Red Hat than most people who only have heard about them.

The importance of Free Software (as in Open Source).

People have complained that some ISV companies are targeting a specific GNU/Linux distribution, and that this alienates the users of other distributions. I do believe that people are looking at the problem from the wrong perspective. Many ISVs are not only targetting some particular version of GNU/Linux, they are also targetting a specific platform of GNU/Linux. They are not allowing the end user to make a choice of kernel, the choice of a distribution, or the choice of a platform.

Let me explain: people who write proprietary software are interested in marketing a software product as a piece of intellectual property that they own and that comes with a price tag, which does not provide the end users with any of the freedoms that the GNU project has identified as important for software. Without these freedoms you are not only potentially locked to a particular distribution: you are locked to a particular kernel, and you are definely locked into a particular platform. You will not get proprietary software to work on your favorite port of the operating system. Forget about the SPARC, the Alpha, the PowerPC, the Motorola, and the StrongARM architectures if you go the proprietary way.

Red Hat and Freedomware (as in OpenSource, Free Software)

So far, Red Hat is the only major visible commercial distribution that distributes all of their development under a free license (LGPL or GPL for their new work, or under the proper compatible license for packages they do not maintain). And they also manage to make money during this process.

Now, making money by giving away your intelectual property is a hard problem. Some people have just given up. Various distributions include proprietary code in their distribution to add a value to their product. The result is of course, a non-free product: you as an end user are forbidden from making copies of it entirely, you might not even get the source code in some cases, and you are definetly forbidden from making changes and redistributing modified versions of it. It comes to mind, the proprietary graphical install programs being shipped these days.

Red Hat standing for Freedomware

When the KDE desktop project started to take off, the licensing problem of Qt became obvious to many people: If we allowed this important component to be non free in a GNU/Linux system, then it would have been impossible to have a completely free (in the sense of freedom) desktop system that people could use, distribute, modify, and redistribute.

Many distributions chose to ship the non-free KDE/Qt combo as part of their systems, as it gave them a competitive advantage on the market. Concerns about a free system came in second place. Red Hat instead of going for the easy money, actually devoted a growing team of programmers to help build a completely free desktop: I am sure they lost sales while preparing for this free system to be built, and I am sure it costed them money to pay their GNOME programmers.

Still, Red Hat stood up for the free software community. To them it was more important to have a full open source desktop than making a quick sell. Given that the Qt toolkit will soon be released with an open-source license this is not an issue anymore. I am presenting this exclusively as an historical data point.

XXXX

Red Hat and Debian are my favorite Linux-based distributions. Actually, they are the best designed and open distributions of Unix from my point of view: they do ship all of their code under a free license.

This, from my point of view is very appealing. Various of my friends are involved in deploying free systems based on GNU and Linux in Mexico in a number of very different setups.

They did require modified versions of the installation program, and modified versions of the packages they use. Not all, but some of them. So the distribution is pretty much Red Hat Linux with some added features that they need for their vertical application. This is something that can be done legally thanks to the fact that the Red Hat distribution does not include "special cases".

Doing something

If you want to see commercial-grade applications on the free systems and have users have total control of the code, the platform, the operating system and the distribution, promote free software: help free software developers, contribute code, contribute proof-reading time, contribute documentation or help other people understand why free software is important.

Disclaimer

These are just my personal opinions. I am not speaking for any project I am involved with in this mail nor am I speaking for any organization I belong to. These are strictly my personal opinions.

I do not work for Red Hat and I have not worked for Red Hat in the past. I have just contributed and worked with their hackers in the past.

Miguel de Icaza.
[e-mail]

Volunteerism and software

OK, so you devote the time that you spend on a computer to volunteer work. Good for you! Volunteerism is a good thing. However, I noticed that while you're bashing on people who write software for pay, you don't bother to ask what (if anything) they do for free in their off hours.

Consider the following people:
(a) A carpenter who volunteers in a soup kitchen on weeknights.
(b) A waiter who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity on weekends.

Is one of these people better than the other? Should Carpenter chastise Waiter, simply because Waiter charges people for food? Should Waiter chastise Carpenter, simply because Carpenter charges people to build houses? Of course not.

Of course, if Waiter started building houses for the rich, then I wouldn't be surprised if Carpenter got mad. Similarly, if the Carpenter started giving away gourmet food in the lobby of Merrill-Lynch at lunchtime, I wouldn't be surprised if Waiter got mad.

Now, consider this one:
(c) You, who does X for a living, and volunteers to write software.
(d) Someone else, who writes software for pay, and does X in his spare time for free.

I bet you can do the math. You have no call to criticize Software Boy for writing software, just as he has no call to criticize you for doing X. If anything, HE may be able to criticize YOU for providing free software to people who can pay for it. That one goes the other way, of course, but I don't know what X is.


I think that I've made my point, but I'm going to go a (controversial) step further, while I'm on the ol' soapbox.

For all of you out there who think that you're doing the Lord's work by writing free software, guess what? Free software is not the ultimate in altruism. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's pretty low on the altruism totem pole, compared to, say, youth outreach, helping illiterates learn how to read, most kinds of work with the poor, and a LOT of other things. Now, hey, if that's where your particular skill lies, and you really enjoy it, then go for it, it IS appreciated. But don't get high-n-mighty about it. Frankly, I'd rather see you spending your time teaching underprivileged children the basics of computing.

And maybe the person that you criticized does just that. Maybe not, but you didn't bother to ask.

Re:And look behind them...

This sort of article is the type of crap I get sick of. It's not a straightforward RH bashing, but it's nevertheless plays into that mentality.

but RH is a business run by businessmen.

So what? I've heard this argument again and again and again in the Linux community, and it makes no sense.

It's a business. That in itself is not evil. It makes it different...or are you just admitting you are scared of something that is "different"? Do you really need to be reminded that *many* businesses promote research and extend technologies everyday, ranging from computer technologies, engineering, and basic science research? We buy from them as consumers _all the time_. If they're bad, we've been buying from them for ages and are implicated in their longevity.

Really--I think it's because of the threat of a "business mentality" calls up all sorts of bad images. But frankly, we view the worse and forget the best and average that businesses produce. A different mentality in the Linux community isn't going to kill us, and if we can't handle it, Linux deserves to be splintered for their incapacity of staying together.

However, should this get taken too far, Debian is right there.

And? Are people so caught up against Red Hat that they've forgotten the basic principles behind Open Source? It's been like this ever since someone modified Open Source source code. You have a choice to use it or not. You have a choice to modify it.

Not to mention, this "Debian is right there" approaches more of a _business_ attitude: there is competition. You know what? Good. I like that. Better code is written, more products are released, programs and distros improve.

All this RH bashing is simply like-MS sentiment brought into the Linux community. People use what they will and what they want. They have the right to be stupid. But, as the MetroWerks article a few days ago showed, there are people that have created RH FUD. MetroWerks NEVER had an exclusive agreement, and RH NEVER forced them to. But people here still insist, without evidence, that RH is evil because of a product's packaging. If you don't want it shrink wrapped, don't buy it.

Confessions of a Properietary Coder

Yes, I develop closed source applications. I support AIX 4.x, Solaris 2.5 and up, HP-UX 10.2 and up, and Red Hat Linux 5.2 and up.

No, not Linux 2.x, but Red Hat. Why? Because with 3 other platforms to develop on I don't want to take the time to see what, if any, differences I might find on Debian, Slackware, or any of the others. By supporting Red Hat, I can cover Intel, Sparc, and Alpha in a fairly straight forward fashion. Why did I choose Red Hat? It was an easy choice, I already had it and so did the customer.

You want people like me to open the code? Not going to happen. You want me to support all versions of Linux? Pay me more money. Does that make me just another developer whore? I'll let you decide.

Re:On "RedHat Only" support...

RinkRat asks:

How does the recent announcement(s) of software that is supported under "RH only" work into this? Is there something added/mangled by RH to enforce this or are the companies only going to offer support if you say that you have an RH release. (Purchased or dl'ed? Will there be a difference?)

There is nothing added by Red Hat to Linux to enforce "Red Hat Only" software. When you see proprietary Linux software labeled "For Red Hat Linux", all it means is that they only bothered to test it on Red Hat (and probably only a specific version of Red Hat). If you try to use it on anything else, they won't support you. This is not Red Hat's doing, it is lazy commercial developers.


And who decides these things? The software companies?

Yes.


Or RH? "We'll give you $X if you only support RH..."

To my knowledge Red Hat has never done this; not even with developers they have had special agreements with (such as TriTeal and Applix). In fact, Red Hat has actively tried to convince several companies to Free their source code (eg. Intel, TrollTech).

And look behind them...

While I am not as paranoid about Red Hat as many here, neither am I willing to give as much credit to altruism as Miguel is. The hackers that work for Red Hat may be great and generous people, but RH is a business run by businessmen. If companies release software that runs on "Red Hat Linux", not on Linux in general, I don't think you'll find many complaints from them. It's called a competitive advantage, and most businesses like it.

However, should this get taken too far, Debian is right there. It will run the software in most cases, is IMHO higher quality, and while it has its own problems (nothing is perfect) it is basically immune to the kind of corporate wheeling and dealing people are so afraid of. Don't think Red Hat isn't aware that if they make a big stumble Debian is right there to pick up the pieces. This will go a long way toward 'keeping them honest'.

As an interesting aside (to me anyway), I talked to an engineer a while back from a company who shall remain nameless ;) that ships a "Red Hat Linux" supported product. He said that all their development is done on Debian. Go figure.

Re:Well, I am back to Slackware.

I've used Slackware for the better part of 4 years, I think since they had kernel version 1.2.13 on it, before that I used a roll-your-own
distro I made with some friends.

Recently I bought a RedHat 6.0 CD. I figured it was worth a try and I wondered why everyone was
always constantly bashing RedHat.

Granted, I don't particularly *like* the new way of things, but once you look at the way it's done and read some documentation, it's actually very easy to configure your system from the shell prompt.

The breaking up of say, the entire network init in a few directories with separate scripts for each interface makes my life a whole lot easier. I just have to edit one file instead of diving into rc.inet1 or rc.inet2, finding what needs changing
and changing that.

And okay, RH 6 came with GNOME. I like GNOME. I used to hate it, but I've come to like the flexibility it gives me.

On the MetroWerks issue; who prevents you from downloading alien, and turning it into a slackware package? I've done it often enough and sure, sometimes it's symlink city to make things work,
but aren't we forgetting that Linux=Linux=Linux no matter who distributes it? I've worked with RedHat, Slackware, Debian and SuSE, and they're all Linux. All distro's have ls, gcc, etc. -- they just have a different way of packaging things, and a different way of administrating things.

So far on my RH box, the only time I did use the control panel is when I wanted to find out what files were changed when you change the settings on your Ethernet interfaces. After that I did every change by hand, on the shell prompt.

Why do we (the Linux/OpenSource) community have to war over distributions when there is so much to be learned from the different ways these people have chosen to create the distro?

Wasn't the idea behind Linux 'free for all'?
Then why bother with the trivialities of exclusive
deals made by companies? What prevents you from going out, buying the RH CD with CodeWarrior on it and installing it on your Slackware box?

Before my RH 6 installation my system resembled the product of an orgy between Slack, Debian and RH. I used .deb packages, rpm packages, slackware packages, own compiled stuff, and yes, it takes time to make everything work flawlessly, but that's what I like. I like the challenge of making things work, and I really don't give a rats ass what distribution is the best, or which one has the c00lest and 3l33t toys, I just want Linux. And I want it to work. I want it to do what I want it to do, and if that means having to put up with RH signing exclusive deals, then so be it, I'm still using Linux, and I'm still making it work.

Moral of the story: Everyone STFU about the petty little distribution wars, and let's kick some ass and make Linux grow.

(Yes, I am wearing my asbestos outfit, and yes, if you bring up that RH signing exclusive deals isn't helping Linux grow, then I won't bother responding. It's time to think people...)

A look at the facts, please!

A small, vocal minority of the community is worried about Red Hat suddenly becoming an evil, "bad guy" company that will take over Linux and ruin it for everyone. I think this is a joke. Let's take a look at the facts, shall we???

* Red Hat releases all software they write under the GPL, period.
* Since their distro-specific software is GPL'd, Red Hat relies on their brand name to drive sales. The only thing keeping their customers from switching to another Linux distro is our satisfaction with their product. The last thing a company in this position wants to do is to piss off their clientele! They will continue to do what their users' request, or they will go out of business.
* Success has not corrupted Red Hat. They continue to produce useful, GPL'd software. Their distro is still available for free FTP download.

I guess in this case, some believe that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc, it must be The New Microsoft. Maybe some people will never let the facts get in the way of severe paranoia.

Instead of speculating what Red Hat *might* do, let's instead look at what their trackrecord is extrapolate the future from there.

Why I don't bash RedHat...

I don't use Redhat's distro, NONE of my servers are Redhat,
I use Debian, but I will NOT bash redhat for three very simple reasons.

Alan Cox
David Miller
Stephen Tweedie

They Make LINUX better every Day and Every way,
I as a Linux USER benefit directly from their work.
If they thought that Red Hat was Evil in any way, these people wold not WORK for Redhat.
Redhat is a company, even great company's make mistakes, or do things that I do not agree with.

Oh and one other thing, Redhat has contributed SOURCE over and over again, how many people can claim that?
As a Debian user I use software that redhat helped develop, it makes my system MORE secure and easier
to use, the software? PAM.
This is just another example, of Redhat ability to produce source that I use every day and benefit.

YOU are the type of person that this is for.

First: edit your /root/.bashrc to change this.

Second: If you didn't know this already, then you are exactly the person that this "are you really sure?" safety net is designed for. Remove it at your own risk.

Red Hat and Commercialism

I would much rather have Red Hat getting most of the focus from commercial companies, since they are very insistant on the GPL. Red Hat is dedicated to the GPL, and open source. They do not release any of their software as proprietary. In fact, their installation utilities are GPL, unlike others. That is why you see so many small distros that are based around Red Hat. You can't do that with Caldera and a few other Distros. Basically, Debian and Red Hat work to ensure that the GPL is followed. Many other distrobutions seem to feel that the GPL is a hinderance, and that they need to make their money off of proprietary parts of their distrobution. I don't worry too much about Red Hat's strength in this market, I just hope MS never gets controlling shares of their stock, now that would suck.

Re:The 'Mouth' Speaks...

He is letting it die. You're not letting it die.

It makes sense to mention KDE because his whole point is that RedHat stood up for free software by refusing to include KDE while there were serious issues with its license. It is clear that this is no longer an issue; his last paragraph in this section says so clearly. It is only relevant to his article because it represents RedHat's stance on free software in the past, which is important to evaluate RedHat's stance on free software in the present.

About Netscape, BRU, and RealVideo: these are very different from KDE. They are not core system components. RedHat is not against commercial software being used on Linux; after all, they used to sell Applixware, they are making deals with commercial distributors, and they still include an "Applications CD" with the $80 RedHat 6.0 that includes many commercial apps.

The difference is that you can have as many commercial apps on top of the OS, and that's not a problem. The real problem is if any core component of Linux is not free... then it becomes possible for an external entity to take control or subvert Linux in some way.

Again, this is apparently no longer an issue with KDE, but the point is that KDE is fundamentally different from typical applications, which is why it's not hypocritical or wrong in any way of RedHat to have discriminated against a non-free KDE/Qt while being kosher with other commercial apps. Yes, we all understand that from a very technical standpoint, KDE, GNOME and the window manager (even X) can be considered to be just other applications on top of the kernel. But they are critical enough to the overall use of the system that they can be considered a more integral part of Linux as a whole than Netscape or other "standard" apps.
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Re:On "RedHat Only" support...

Having been involved in commercial software development, I think I can explain the phenomena. Many people don't appreciate that quality assurance (QA) and maintenance are at least as costly as actual development, if not more so. (This is one of the areas where bazaar-style development helps quite a bit: it is much more efficient to have hundreds of users hitting a software package with something approximating actual usage, than to have tens of QA engineers hitting the software with test cases).

One of the services ISVs such as Red Hat provide is quality assurance. When you purchase a production distribution, you expect to have some assurance that all of the packages provided at least play well together. As anyone who has tried to upgrade software packages can well understand, getting all the dependencies to work well can be non-trivial. Since no two distributions have the same versions of all the packages, and as most software, commercial or non, relies on multiple packages, one can well imagine the benefits of targeting only one distribution, if you are involved in non-bazaar-style development, and especially if you are are developing closed, binary only software. Targetting multiple distributions causes at least a linear increase in QA and support effort, and the increase can be exponential (imagine 2 or 3 tier client/server products, where client 1 + server 1 may test differently from client 1 + server 2, etc.)

If you have to choose one distribution, you choose the most popular.... The "supports Red Hat" line is generally an indication that it was only tested on Red Hat, and that the support and maintenance staff only have Red Hat installed to reproduce reported bugs, and the like.

Re:The 'Mouth' Speaks...

Comparing RedHat's release of some proprietary software, such as Netscape and Real Audio, and their desire to use an open-source desktop is not really valid.

The desktop is a more central component of the system, whereas user applications like netscape just perform a task. People don't write applications based on netscape, but they do write apps based on the desktop.

I think Red Hat had a legit concern that if people wrote free software based on QT (the old non free QT at least), then the software wouldn't really be free because it would be based on code not freely available.

I think from this perspective it makes sense for Red Hat to take the stance they did.

Re:Confessions of a Properietary Coder

The problem is that if you expect to survive in a first world country, you *need* to have money. It's not really an option: No money = no food, no house, no life. Philosophical day dreams can't change that.

I, as well, am a proprietary code writer. Even more so, I write proprietary code for Linux systems. Considering that our business is based on a proprietary value added to Linux, we can't give it away -- and no, the popular Open Source business models don't work for us.

If we could find a way to give all of our code away and still make money, we'd certainly do it. Unfortunately, doing that right now is the equivalent of suicide.

Big businesses opening their proprietary-ware makes sense, because they have other products and a reputation to ask money for. Small companies don't have that luxury, unfortunately. :/

Money doesn't make the world go around. Money is just the tool that makes it possible -- it's the lowest common denominator between the civilizations on this planet that allows people to exchange goods and services, without which the world *would* come to a grinding halt.

Re:On "RedHat Only" support...

I went ahead and asked Metrowerks about this (they have a "Redhat Linux Only" version of Code Warrior) just to find out what they had to say about it. Here's the response I got:

CodeWarrior for Linux (GNU Edition) can run on any moderately recent distribution of Linux that can be made to use RPM's (for intance, we have had customers use it successfully with Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 and SuSE 6.1). If you can "match" Red Hat 5.2, you'd have a pretty good shot. However, we currently only offer technical support on it for Red Hat 5.2+ distributions. Since we take our tech support obligations very seriously, we are wary of recommending it for other distributions. For this reason, we are working on validating CodeWarrior against other distributions right now.

The important thing, IMO, about this response is that it doesn't indicate Red Hat only compatibility, but rather Red Hat only support, which is a vastly different thing. It makes perfect sense to me that a company like Metrowerks would want to explicitly limit the environment they have to support. At the same time, it seems to me that if Red Hat wanted to do something nasty (a la Microsoft) they would have asked for Redhat only compatibility.

In the end, I think that Red Hat is just a little company that's trying to do the right thing. So far they haven't done anything to be upset about, not that I've seen anyway. In fact, their only sin seems to have been success, and if we (as a community) don't get past the success == sin idea then we're doomed to destroy ourselvs.

Like the article said: Red Hat has given a lot back. Let's not lose sight of that just because a witch hunt is exciting.
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