“The arrival of your invitation to the Open Source Conference
encouraged me to follow through on a question that’s been nagging
at me since I read of Red Hat’s going public… I follow with much
interest the open source “movement”–and this development seems
real significant to me. How do you see Red Hat’s going public (and
I hear that Caldera is contemplating it too) contributing to
this–is it enhancing the progress by adding resources (and
notoriety not yet seen for this company by the general populace)?
Do you see involving “equity owners” an evolutionary step that will
facilitate the betterment of the whole movement? I know competition
is good, but is there a threat of splintering this ‘movement’ if
one company gets the upper hand ?”
“Boy, this is a tough question. I don’t think any of us knows
the answer. Big money could distort the open source market in a
significant way. It sure did that to the Internet standards
process… Companies like Netscape (and then Microsoft) turned HTML
and friends into a battleground, to the detriment of users. The
only thing that protected protocols like HTTP and SMTP was the
presence of open source implementations (Apache and Sendmail) with
dominant market share. As that kind of thing goes by the way side,
we could see some major fragmentation. And it is certainly true
that if a company like Sendmail, Inc. is acquired or fails to meet
its financial targets in ways that give control to the financiers
rather than the hackers, that bastion of standards could certainly
be undercut. (To be honest, though, there wasn’t much choice, since
without funding, sendmail’s dominance would likely have fallen by
the wayside as companies like Microsoft aimed squarely at the
internet email server market.)”