No one’s going to like any excerpt we offer on this piece, which
involves Ransom Love getting around to responding to Richard
Stallman calling Caldera “parasites.” We’re also fairly certain RMS
won’t care to be called an “open source” leader, as long as we’re
qualifying things. Beyond the sniping (“Did Richard Stallman ever
invest £50m in Linux? We did.”) is also a look at Mr.
Love’s attitude with regard to Linux as the basis of a successful
business: “before [Red Hat] could become that successful, they had
to develop proprietary software. So why are people so outraged?
Because they want everything for free.
“You can’t call our business model parasitic,” said
Love. “We add value to Linux (news – web sites), so it can become
successful. We integrate Linux in the Back Office. And we do all
the marketing that’s necessary. Did Richard Stallman ever invest
£50m in Linux? We did. I have been involved in the
Linux community since my time at Novell in 1994. With ‘Lizard’ we
developed the first installation service for Linux ever.” Lizard
Unattended Install was released in 1999.“…I remember well the cooperation with [Red Hat’s chief
executive] Bob Young. We developed RPM together, but they’ve got
the credit. What I’m trying to say is: if we are parasitic then we
are symbiotic parasites, although I wouldn’t call us parasites at
all. We gave the Linux community more than Stallman with his
libraries. Our work helps Linux so much more than a few lines of
code.”