Health check: Red Hat – This year’s model

“Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of
problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt,
the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free
software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation
are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source
(in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many
different companies.

“In a changing market the operating system may not be enough.
Red Hat has to stay ahead of the game, or play catch up where it
can, which is why it has moved into middleware with JBoss and
acquired Qumranet and its virtualisation software, KVM. JBoss, in
conjunction with Linux and KVM, gives Red Hat perfect leverage into
the cloud, which is where the operating system may be going. JBoss
uses free software licenses, albeit the LGPL, and KVM has been
included in the Linux kernel as of version 2.6.20s.”

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