CNN/Fortune had a nice segment on Linux tonight. Here’s a
summary.
There was a story about casino owners in competition with each
other. At the conclusion of that story, they had a journalist
giving a preview of the next story, before the commercial
break.
The journalist began describing a new competitor to Microsoft.
The screen then changed to a production line of Red Hat Linux boxes
(the warehouse looked like Software Completions, who
does all of Red Hat’s packaging and shipping.
Then they showed Linus Torvalds, who was saying something to the
effect of, “People don’t want to use Microsoft’s product, because
their products [pause] suck.”
Commercial, and then launched an approximately 8 minute long
story, focusing sharply on Red Hat Software. Bob Young was
interviewed, Linus Torvalds was interviewed, a system administrator
for Mindspring was interviewed, and a few other people. There were
some nice family shots of Linus and his wife and kids.
The term “Open Source” was used in describing the development
model under which the kernel is developed, the software itself was
labeled “Free Software”, although the word “GNU” was never used.
They also talked for a minute about the Medina story.
They described Microsoft’s fear of Linux, demonstrated by the
infamous Halloween document.
Bob Young was quoted saying that Red Hat makes their money by
selling software, and selling support and services. Interestly
enough, at the very end of the story, they cited a new company,
LinuxCare, as being a new competitor to Red Hat Software.
The only URL flashed across the screen during the entire story
was: http://www.linuxcare.com/support.html.
— Dave Whitinger