IBM and RedHat, a marketing stunt?

December 12th, 2004 • Rants

IBM and RedHat join forces?! Well pardon my irrational sense of bad smell, I by no means am a business expert, but when this happens, I bet you anything both companies are going after lots of bucks. My hope is that “ISDs” (Independent Software Developers) won’t have to pay royalties just to get “certified” and get a nice guy-in-a-blue-hat stamp on their site!

I know, I know. Linux is going for the enterprise, blah, blah… But wasn’t the point of free software is to be, well, at least free (oh you know what I mean, as in speech damn it)? I don’t want to have to ask for a certification for my software quality which I might not get because some incredibly ignorant manager decided that he doesn’t like my hair.

So I guess this means that if GNU doesn’t get certified by a multi-billion dollar company we won’t have ls or gzip, right? Or how about Apache, BIND, Qmail and Sendmail? They aren’t ready for the so-called enterprise. Excuse my rage here, but free and enterprise don’t seem to get along well, you can get either, but not both, at least by current standards.

Yes, UnitedLinux is a great effort, having various standards that Linux distributions must follow is also great, but what’s the point of having a single entity decide whether my software (or distribution for the matter) is Linux-quality?

A call for the open source community, please don’t make this happen, IBM and RedHat are a lot of help, just don’t let them take control.

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