“Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, who said he wasn’t really the right
person to respond to Linus’ charges, also said that Red Hat has
been expecting a denunciation like this. The rumbling has been
going on for months and in many corners.”
“The GCC Steering Committee got its hackles up about it back in
early October when it publicly branded the so-called GCC 2.96
compiler unfit for production release. It said it was a
‘development branch’ of what would eventually be GCC 3.0. “GCC 2.96
is not a formal GCC release,’ ‘nor will there ever be such a
release.’ It’s merely a way station on the road to GCC 3.0….”
“The instability of Red Hat 5.0 put Informix, the first serious
enterprise ISV to port to Linux, in a quandary. It ported the
Informix SE database to the more stable SuSE instead, then came up
against the popularity issue. Red Hat simply had more market share
than SuSE. Informix decided it had to do a special port to Red Hat
since the code written for the less radical SuSE would not run on
Red Hat, a familiar, if distasteful, problem for any old-line Unix
ISV.”