Re: [MLUG] Goodbye Red Hat Linux

[Herbert Wolverson <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 10:08:42PM -0800, EMAIL:PROTECTED wrote:
> I am wondering if the lesson to take away from this incident is to be 
> very leery of any "free" software being given away by a for-profit 
> company.  In the end, they are going to want money out of you one way 
> or another.
> 
> Can someone sort through the various common distros and the BSD's and 
> break them down as to which are put out by for-profit companies, and 
> which are put out by non-profit organizations?
> 

The ones that I know about for sure:

BSD world (pretty much all non-profit):
* FreeBSD: non-profit, backed by the FreeBSD foundation and some 
companies, notably Juniper (all Juniper routers run FreeBSD). The
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have funded 
various chunks of FreeBSD development (notably the MACL system
in 5.x), also. Apple have handed over cash, too.
* NetBSD: non-profit, largely community backed but have received
money from Intel and AMD for early chip support.
* OpenBSD: non-profit, although they have received funding from
some academic and defense groups in the past (there was quite a
stink about some funding being cut off a while ago).
* DragonflyBSD: non-profit, I've not heard of any major funding
stream.

Linux world:
* Mandrake: partly community funded, but largely the property of
Mandrakesoft, a French company (just out of bankruptcy!). Mandrake
are good about releasing their code as GPL-licensed SRPMS, so if
they fold the distro can live on without support.
* SUSE: pretty much privately owned, by a German company. SuSE are
now part of Novell, who have a decent OpenSource record of late -
but I've never met a product they couldn't kill.
* Red Hat: corporate owned, (almost?) all of their server management 
tools are available GPLed as SRPMs. Fedora, the desktop distro is
community deveoped.
* Debian has always been for the community, by the community. They
recently agreed that their social contract can be ammended, so the
core Debian distro may feature less-than-perfectly free software
in the future.
* Slackware is produced by a guy named Patrick Volkenburg (spelling?),
and used to make him some money. He's really in it for the love of
making Slack, though - and the Slack community is pretty tight.
* TurboLinux are privately owned and have been pretty hostile to
releasing their stuff free in the past. They are popular in Asia.
* Red Flag Linux is basically run by the Chinese government, who
aren't entirely known for freedom...

I don't know about Gentoo (mainly because I haven't had a chance
to really play with it, yet), Knoppix (I've used it long enough
to say 'cool' and boot FreeBSD again!) and many of the smaller
distros.

For work, I always use FreeBSD unless there is a compelling
(ie. Oracle support!) reason not to. It is partly a case of
sticking with what I know (and FreeBSD is rock solid!), but I
like the fact that FreeBSD's structure is completely independent
of commercial concerns; the core team goes with a mix of what
works and 'ideal world' concepts, and has turned away commercially
supplied patches that don't fit into the bigger picture. At the
same time, they are friendly to new/interesting work from the
commercial/academic and even defense world as long as it is BSD-
licensed.
For the same reason, when I use Linux, I use Debian (I used to
use Slackware, and Ygdrasil before that); Red Hat et al. could
go belly up and Debian would still be around - and still actively
developed.

-- Herbert.
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