[NCLUG] "red hat - the new redmond?" comment from mainstream online media

Kevin Fenzi kevin at scrye.com
Sat Sep 7 13:49:23 MDT 2002


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>>>>> "Idris" == Idris S Hamid <ishamid at attbi.com> writes:

>> Well, the part where they tried to kill it was because it wasn't
>> GPL'ed. RedHat doesn't ship any non GPL'ed things. Would you want
>> to force them to ship a MS office if one was available?

Idris> Red Hat ships lots of non-GPLed stuff, like X11 and TeX;-> And

sorry. Forgive me for being over-narrow. Of course I meant that they
don't ship anything that doesn't meet the Open Source definition. 
The X11 liscense (from http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licence.html)
says:  

"The XFree86 Project is committed to providing freely redistributable
binary and source releases. The main licence we use is based on the
traditional Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) X11/X
Consortium licence, often called the Xll-licence. The X11-licence does
not impose any conditions on the modification or redistribution of
either the source code or binaries other than requiring that copyright
and/or licence notices are left intact which is consistent with the
Open Source definition. "

The TeX shipped with redhat is 'tetex'. Which as far as I can see is
GPL'ed. Am I missing something there?

The other weird ones:

netscape - now removed in the last beta finally. 
ghostscript - new versions are propriatary, but older ones (after I
year I think it was) are GPL. RedHat ships the older ones. 

Idris> they were shipping closed, proprietary, CDE before KDE came

RedHat did ship CDE, but not as part of their linux distribution. It
was a seperate product. You couldn't download it, you had to buy it. 

Netscape is really the only non opensource thing that they have had in
their distribution for a while, and with 8.0 that will go away too. I
would love to hear corrections... 

Idris> along. Free-software purism aside, I believe it was all about
Idris> market leverage. _Despite_ the Qt-GPL flap, the official German
Idris> version of RedHat carried non-free-as-in-speech Qt as well as
Idris> free KDE _before_ the issue was resolved. In Germany it appears
Idris> they realized they could not kill KDE since their market
Idris> presence was so much more proportionally smaller and KDE so
Idris> much more popular. In America they had more leverage and used
Idris> it to try & keep KDE out of the hands of consumers.

again, could you provide a cite for this? 

Idris> Pure hypocrisy.

we see what we want to see, don't we? 

Idris> Best wishes Idris

kevin
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