Red Hat bucks the trend

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 02:55

Opinion and Analysis

Had there been a likelhood that selling potatoes was a good way of making tons of money, then Novell may have ventured in that direction.

Red Hat has never betrayed the open source community; Novell has done that in spades and is now attempting to justify its patent deal with Microsoft, a deal that is yet to show any benefits.

Over the past few years, Red Hat has faced a number of opponents without flinching. Oracle tried to do the same as CentOS and sell the resulting product as "unbreakable Linux."

Red Hat's position at the time was that the value proposition which it brought to the table was better because Oracle was creating its own code fork. "We add only what comes from the upstream developers and this code is open," Red Hat's Australia and New Zealand boss Max McLaren said at the time.

The additional value, he said, came from the 2000-plus independent software and hardware vendors who certify that their offerings will work with Red Hat.

We don't hear much about Oracle's unbreakable product these days. Perhaps, like Superman coming up against Kryptonite, it met its nemesis.

Last month, Novell, increasingly desperate for money, announced that it would try and pull customers using Red Hat and CentOS over to using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Red Hat chose to stay mum. The people over there apparently know the value in the old saying: "Speech is silver, silence is golden."