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Red Herring: 10 top entrepreneurs

[ Thanks to ll for this
link. ]

Bob Young and Marc Ewing are taking Linux mainstream and
giving Microsoft a run for the money.

“In spaghetti Westerns, villains wore black hats and sheriffs
wore white. What should we make of entrepreneurs who wear red
fedoras? A great deal, if the people wearing them are Robert Young
and Marc Ewing, the soft-spoken duo behind Red Hat Software. Under
their stewardship, the company’s principal product, a software
operating system called Red Hat Linux, is now so attractive to
corporate America that it poses a formidable threat to Microsoft’s
operating system monopoly.”

“Red Hat’s success is largely dependent upon the growing
popularity of the open-source development model. This model lets
third-party software developers contribute new features and
improvements to the lines of source code that make up a piece of
software. Most software vendors rely on closed-source development,
which prohibits third parties from modifying the software’s source
code. As a result, not even Microsoft’s army of independent
software developers can match the programming efforts of Linux
devotees.”


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