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List:       gentoo-dev
Subject:    [gentoo-dev] Re: minimalistic emerge
From:       Duncan <1i5t5.duncan () cox ! net>
Date:       2014-08-09 11:03:12
Message-ID: pan$a0fea$6e8fcd3c$fa696e3f$794a175c () cox ! net
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Peter Stuge posted on Sat, 09 Aug 2014 10:34:58 +0200 as excerpted:

> Duncan wrote:
>> Red Hat is the gold standard, very long term commercial support,
>> IIRC 10 years, and very good community relations
> 
> I've heard this on occasion, but reality is actually quite different.
> 
> Red Hat is a software service provider. They do whatever their paying
> customers ask for. They do not take community relations very seriously
> in my experience. I believe it is the job of a single person.

I guess I was using a rather broader definition of "community relations" 
than that.

Red Hat directly employs a decent number of people working on various 
core Linux projects, benefiting not just Red Hat but the entire Linux and 
often the entire FLOSS (BSDs, etc included) community.  That's the sort 
of "community relations" I had in mind, not just what one or more people 
in a single RH department do.

I haven't actually counted all the upstream projects they either sponsor 
monetarily and with conferences, etc, or directly contribute employees 
to, but it's definitely non-trivial.  Were Red Hat to disappear, a lot of 
people would be looking for other employment and a lot of conferences 
would be looking for other high-level sponsors.  Not that they couldn't 
find it, but it's certainly leave a big hole until things settled down, 
that's for sure.

Take a look at the per-release LWN kernel activity statistics, for 
instance.  Red Hat is always ranked pretty high.  I know they're also 
involved in gnome and in systemd, and believe they're involved in various 
other freedesktop.org projects as well.  This is all community relations 
and involvement, far ahead of what most other commercial distros provide, 
and unlike say Ubuntu with its pretty-much Ubuntu-only Unity and Mir 
projects (compare gnome3 and wayland), Red Hat apparently sees value in 
working WITH the broader FLOSS community rather than going its own way.

In fact, their broad level of sponsorship within the community is 
sometimes seen as driving Red Hat focus to the exclusion of other 
distros, and indeed there may be a bit of truth to that, but compare the 
Red Hat approach to that of Ubuntu with Mir and Unity, and I doubt you'll 
find many wishing for more Ubuntus, while more Red Hats could only 
benefit the community by broadening its focus and making it less 
singularly Red Hat focused.

And they've always encouraged community-driven Red Hat clones as well, 
even sponsoring CentOS now, along with Fedora, as I said earlier.  
Compare that with say Oracle as a corporate parent and what they did to 
the various projects they inherited from Sun, including OpenSolaris, 
OpenOffice.org, MySQL...

I'm not saying Red Hat doesn't have corporate profit as a motive, but 
unlike many other corporate "friends" where the saying about who needs 
enemies with friends like that often rings true, Red Hat has anything but 
the "embrace and extinguish" reputation various others have gotten over 
the years.  They really /do/ seem to "get it" that a healthy FLOSS 
community really is in their best interest as well, and their actions, 
sponsorships and direct employee paychecks continue to demonstrate it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman


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