TLWIR 22: Red Hat, India’s Supreme Court, and More

[ Thanks to Andrew
Weber for this link. ]

“Red Hat is about to buy an open source storage company called
Gluster, a maker of an open source distributed file system. Gluster
allows a company or individual to create their own public or
private cloud deployment. Gluster is a great addition to the Red
Hat family of software, one that already has a very rich selection
of choices. For example, starting with Fedora 16, Fedora will
support Openstack, a cloud operating system created by Rackspace
and NASA. Presumably, Openstack support will make its way from
Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and this will allow customers
to combine Gluster and Openstack in interesting ways in their cloud
applications.

“In the last edition of The Linux week in review, I gave a
preview of Fedora 16. In this edition, I will discuss some
conceptual differences between Oracle and Red Hat. These
fundamental differences cause me to trust Red Hat, but reserve my
trust as it relates to Oracle. There are many reasons for this, but
one of the primary ones is this: Red Hat acquires open source
companies, and then leverages these companies to give their
customers more freedom and more choices. Oracle, in my humble
opinion, seems to buy companies with only one goal in mind: to make
as much money from the company as possible. If it does not see any
way to monetize the purchase, it simply dumps the product, as it
recently did with OpenOffice.org. However, there is an unseen cost
in this kind of behavior. Each time that I see Red Hat buy an open
source company and nurture it, even if they may be losing some
money on the deal, I gain a little bit more faith in Red Hat. When
I see Oracle use a company or product up, and then dump it like
yesterday’s trash, I not only lose faith in Oracle, I lose faith in
the product. I used OpenOffice.org for 7 years, but I will never
use it again. Oracle so damaged the product that Libreoffice is now
a much better choice for a myriad of reasons. Oracle could take a
hard lesson from Red Hat when it comes to developing loyalty, and
brand confidence.”

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