Free software & commercialisation (was: Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?)

[Alex Hudson]

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 11:32, Chris Croughton wrote:
> MS seem to be very into the "meetings culture" and against people
> mixing much between teams (one hand not knowing what the other is
> doing).  So I've heard from people who have worked for them both in the
> UK and in the US.

I heard they were quite competitive internally, but I always thought of
it as a great place to work. Although I have heard the meetings culture
thing too.. but I did think that one of the things MS got right was the
way they treated their staff and made it an enticing place to work.

> No official or paid-for support for Fedora.  But of course anything the
> users and developers do in Fedora will be fed back to their sold
> 'Enterprise' product.

The source to RHEL is available too, as I understand it, on the same
basis as RedHat used to be available (Lance would know more about this
though). I would guess the vast majority of it is free software.

Personally, I'm not sure what problem you see in Fedora -> RHEL patch
movement. They do pay for most (all?) of the Fedora developers at the
moment, and given they're just making a distro they will always be
living off vastly other people's work. But I am a Fedora user, so.... ;)

> It's pretty clear that they see Fedora as a 'lesser' system for
> 'developers' and other techie types, but they'll happily accept anything
> that community come up with back into their commercial product.

Stuff does filter the other way too, though, to be fair. They are also
in the position to have feet in various different projects, and are able
to ensure that they can make good stuff happen by bringing projects
together (NPTL?) - the community doesn't always do that. It often takes
commercial interest to come in and get jobs done - Sun's
UI/accessibility work is another example.

Cheers,

Alex.