Verily I say unto thee, that BearItAll spake thusly:
> There is still room for Redhat, I don't really want to see any
> company go under. But if they continue in their arrogant 'We are the
> biggest therefore we don't have to put in any effort' attitude, then
> I wouldn't moan their loss at all, they haven't actually 'added' to
> Linux for a long time, concentrating only on new sales. In Redhat's
> favour I will say they are putting more effort in now, bet your left
> sock they wouldn't have lifted a finger if Oracle hadn't come in.
I'd say Red Hat has contributed significantly to Linux over the years,
and yes, recently too.
SELinux: Red Hat has probably put more work into integrating this into
the distribution than any other Vendor, especially WRT MAC policies,
which are now so well defined that a typical RH/FC user can run on
enforced-mode without any difficulty. Compare this to Vista's UAC,
which is such an utter disaster that the first thing virtually every
Vista user will do, upon booting it up for the first time, is switch
the damned annoying nagware off, thus defeating the whole purpose and
reducing Vista to an XP level of security, or worse. AFAICT Oracle has
made zero contribution to enhanced security over the same time-frame.
First and Second Tier Integration, Support and Training: Red Hat has
done as least as much in terms of support as Oracle over the years,
and with the acquisition of JBoss last year, and their subsequent
Application Stack, are now a serious one-stop solutions provider. I
don't hear much about Oracle's training programmes, however Red Hat
certification is beyond reproach as the Industry Standard. Red Hat's
products, services and training are regularly cited as the best in the
Industry, e.g. winning Insight magazine's annual Vendor Value Survey
two years running.
Testing, Deployment, and Emerging Technologies: Red Hat have close
working relationships with upstream developers, the Kernel developers
in particular, very frequently submitting patches and bug
reports. Take a look at the changelogs for various different packages
in any non-Red-Hat distro, and you'll see Red Hat Email addresses
strewn all over them. Red Hat were primarily responsible for the
introduction and wide deployment of packages such as AIGLX (the core
technology that enables things like Compiz/Beryl eye-candy) and LVM2
(their system-config-lvm python tool is probably the De Facto GUI
based LVM managemnt tool available). The Fedora Core community distro
has probably done more to push the wire on emerging technologies than
any other distro, and all that bleeding-edge technology is backed up
by Red Hat's enterprise class testing, bugtracking and buildsystems,
not to mention the guru old-school engineers at Red Hat who probably
designed most of it to begin with.
So I'd say Red Hat has more than pulled it's weight WRT contributing
to Linux over the years. I can't say the same about Oracle.
--
K.
http://slated.org - Slated, Rated & Blogged
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| "Future archaeologists will be able to identify a 'Vista Upgrade
| Layer' when they go through our landfill sites" - Sian Berry, the
| Green Party.
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Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.19-1.2288.fc5
21:23:32 up 8:49, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
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