I have another question, why doesn’t Mr. Shuttleworth go with a more stable product like OpenSolaris to base his free OS on? I may get shunned for that statement in the linux community but it is better in alot of ways and with his money he could make it into a wonderful desktop OS. It has the standards already and then the next step would be to push software companies to produce the software for it and more hardware driver support. I found what Redhat and Suse did disturbing a little too, they should provide the OS for free without support as before in binaries.

First off, Red Hat puts a crapload of developers on countless projects. A great majority of Red Hat customers know where every dollar they give to Red Hat goes, GPL, GPL and more GPL. There is no equal to Red Hat in the space, even before you exclude hardware-focused vendors, Red Hat still tops them as well.

Secondly, trademark issues are real. They have been the issue with Red Hat, namely Red Hat’s prior lack of enforcement. No matter how many times Red Hat attempted to address the Red Hat(R) brand with guidelines, people still forced the issue. Thank Cobalt, Sun and countless others for the abuse for forcing this issue.

Third, Canoncial is the new Mandriva. Yes, Mandrive “won the war of perception,” and where did that get them? Red Hat has a proven, sustainable model around the community. Let me say that again, a proven, sustainable model around the community. Sun and, to a lesser extent, Novell have a model of forking from upstream — Red Hat embraces upstream and it drives everything they do.

Fourth, Red Hat knows those who want to pay for support want a subscription and an all encompassing experience. Those who do not often fall into the category of those who want to repackage and redistribute a distro without limitations. The later was Red Hat Linux prior (which was never officially supported more than a year), and now Fedora (because of the prior trademark issues). You can even rebrand Fedora distros easily, and you don’t have to worry about software with indemification issues. There is no interest served trying to do both — one filled with both trademark issues and people complaining about trailing edge all while commercial uses complain it moves too fast.

Lastly, for those that don’t want a long-term RHEL with support, there’s CentOS. CentOS is a great distro and fills the gap of RHEL not being freely redistributable. Unfortunately, Red Hat cannot do the same. It goes back to the trademark and the Red Hat(R) brand. People don’t realize that is what cost Red Hat in the first place, people believing that the Linux/MIPS port from Cobalt sporting “Red Hat(R) Linux” was from Red Hat, and all those negative issues and mis-use of trademark. This is the reality of the marketplace people, sorry.

You want to blame people? It’s not Red Hat. It’s because the GPL doesn’t address trademark abuses. Even Linus and Linux International run into this with the abuses of the Linux(R) trademark as well. We all lose, Red Hat more than any other, major distro ever — no one but Red Hat(R) allowed its trademark to be so freely redistributed to the point it almost lost the name due to unenforcement. People want RHEL because it says Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux, don’t blame Red Hat because they won’t give away that brand for free.

Mark, I can only sum this up as utter envy of the Red Hat(R) brand. I run and even maintained Debian and Gentoo in addition to Fedora, RHEL and CentOS. I’ve supported Ubuntu and think it’s a great addition to the distro list, one that is very popular for very good reasons. But if you want Canonical to continue to just be another Mandriva, keep up this rheotric and near-libel.