On Wed, Dec 30, 1998 at 12:17:07AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Red Hat is not an OS vendor in the classic sense. Red Hat is a marketing
> company that happens to produce some neat packages along the way, but
> their primary goal in life is to make something written by other people
> into a product that people are willing to purchase.
Sounds a lot like unix, doesn't it? Because the software redhat
packages costs less to get their hands on, and because the don't have
to do license negotiations with upwards of 600 programmers for upwards
of 600 packages, they can sell it for the service charge of their
integration. While unix vendors typically charge huge premiums for
the OS because of licensing fees. Maybe they charge more for less
integration service on top of it. I don't know. So how much is
unixware or sco? Aren't they just selling software that someone else
wrote? How much is DEC unix? Did DEC actually write the thing?
> What they've accomplished when viewed as a *marketing company* is
> extremely impressive. I wouldn't evaluate them with a metric of veteran
> programmers spending all their time writing code any more than I'd
> evaluate Dan on how well he markets his product.
Do you mean this? Perhaps it's true... aside for the people employed
to pump out code, ala Alan Cox or Rasterman. Or the folks there who
get paid and supported to create software like gnome, and to add the
things they think is important to gnome? Early on Sopwith added
Objective-C suport into gnome because he likes the language. He also
created a free C-callable CORBA ORB (a rarity - it's only the second
free one that I know of)? Never mind that they give away all of their
software under the GPL, a loss-leader strategy at best, right? That
doesn't really qualify them as just a marketing company.
If you continue this discussion/debate, please respond off of the
qmail list. We've completely eliminated qmail from the discussion at
this point.
-Peter
