November 7th, 2007
Can Red Hat ever make open source advocates happy?
Red Hat has joined Sun’s OpenJDK project, aligning its IcedTea project with it. (Should that now be IcedCoffee?)
The reaction of open source bloggers to this news? Finally, wrote our own Stephen Shankland. What was the hold-up, asked EnterpriseLinux. What took you, asked Business Review Online.
I’ve previously compared Red Hat here to Rodney Dangerfield , and earlier today I hinted at the reason.
Red Hat is run like a corporation, not a community. It’s run by executives, not by programmers.
Right now, the company is launching a re-org, under former EMC executive Nick Van Wyk, which is also focused on corporate goals. To those who base their view of open source on sharing, this sounds galling.
But is it? Red Hat has not made a move against CentOS, a binary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which does not even credit Red Hat on its Web site.
Greg DeKoenigsberg (above), the Red Hat Community Development Manager who also blogs as Gregdek, insisted recently there is no ill will. The lack of credit is just Red Hat protecting its trademark, he wrote. “Why is there no CentOS equivalent based on SuSE products?” he added. “Think about it.”
As to why Red Hat was so late with the IcedTea, Dave Shields suggested, the answer might be SunTea. Despite making OpenJDK open source, Sun still insists on complete control, he writes. Red Hat has finally ceded the point.
In other words, Red Hat is still in better odor with much of the the open source community than Sun, and perhaps that is why Sun’s results are so disappointing. Going down the open source incline means more than accepting the GPL. It also means accepting the standards and methods of the open source world.
Which Red Hat seems to do, even though the view of these issues, from Silicon Valley across to Raleigh, North Carolina, does tend to look a bit like Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover, only with Santa Clara in the foreground and everything else distant.
Besides, Steve Ballmer still hates Red Hat. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is indeed your friend.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 11/07/07
