Jan writes:
> Red Hat has not dropped Linux OS. Red Hat has just divided there
> distributions in a different way.

There will no longer be a free distribution of Linux with the name RedHat on
it, or one available from the company RedHat.  This rather strikes me as
"dropping".

> Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro's are commercial products, but there is
> also the Fedora Project. This latter product is an Open Source project
> with Red Hat as the distributor.

I think RedHat is simply a contributor to the project (and may host it).  I
don't think they would say they are "distributing" it, since it's clear that
they don't want anyone to think it's a serious option.

> Wasn't that the idea behind open source anyway.

Sure, but RedHat has always had this split-personality problem where their
techies think they are working to support creation of "free" software, but
their marketing people always behave as though it is a proprietary product
owned by RedHat.  If you visited RedHat's web pages, it was virtually
impossible to find out that the things they were trying to sell you for a
lot of money could be gotten for free (often from them).

The current changes at RedHat are the logical progression of this situation.
As a profit-based publicly-owned company, they are forced towards trying to
sell their product for as much money as possible.  This means they have to
try to eliminate competition, in this case in the form of the very thing
that their whole existence is based on, the freely distributable Linux
Kernel and all the GPLed (and similarly licensed) software that goes with it
to make up a complete operating system.

It is now in RedHat's interest for "free" Linux distributions to look as bad
and unviable for commercial use as possible.  They have to keep supporting
the Fedora project because it's where much of their commercial product comes
from, but they can't have it look like a viable (i.e. stable) version of
Linux that anyone (other than a hobbyist) would ever want to use.

Since RedHat is apparently unable to be satisfied by the revenue that's
available to them as a support provider and feel they must become a
Microsoft-like commercial operating system product provider.  To succeed at
this, they must destroy the commercial viability of all non-RedHat Linux
versions, *especially* those that are available at no cost.

As was written in the Slashdot story of a few days ago:

   http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/12/2323256

"OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author
personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making
Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of
Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to
Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."

G.

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