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

[Idris S Hamid]

> 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?

Red Hat ships lots of non-GPLed stuff, like X11 and TeX;-> And they were 
shipping closed, proprietary, CDE before KDE came along. Free-software purism 
aside, I believe it was all about market leverage. _Despite_ the Qt-GPL flap, 
the official German version of RedHat carried non-free-as-in-speech Qt as 
well as free KDE _before_ the issue was resolved. In Germany it appears they 
realized they could not kill KDE since their market presence was so much more 
proportionally smaller and KDE so much more popular. In America they had more 
leverage and used it to try & keep KDE out of the hands of consumers. 

Pure hypocrisy.

Best wishes
Idris

-- 
Dr. Idris S Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523