Corporations and You: Who’s Who in Open Source – Part 1

“We are living at crucial moments for Open Source: Oracle is
suing Google for patent infringement, Apple is fighting the Android
the way they can, while it boasts that it is an open source company
(I’ll adress it below), and Microsoft’s declaring in the press its
love for open source (huh? WTF?). With all the bombardment of news,
factoids and half truths, how do we stand in the middle of this
whole mess?

“To try to understand this mess, I’ll do a brief analysis of
firms working with Open Source, and comment on how is their
relationship with it. The following list is not definitive and does
not cover all companies.

“Pro Open Source

“Red Hat: It is the company that best sums up the ideals of the
Free, Libre Open Source in the world. It has its paid distribution,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and two free distributions: CentOS, a
distribution that is focused on servers, but always out of date
compared to RHEL and Fedora Linux, a distribution focused more on
the common desktop user.”

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