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Technology Stocks : Red Hat Software Inc. (Nasdq-RHAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry Whlan who wrote (168)	7/27/1999 5:24:00 PM
From: Eric Sandeen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1794

Very few people in the open source community mistake the free in free software as having the same meaning as free beer, rather than free speech. However, this is one of the "risks" that Red Hat disclosed in their filing - that by becoming more of a corporate entity, they may lose some of the faithful. Which would be misguided on the faithful's part, because Red Hat has done everything right as far as Free Software is concerned. They have put a lot of money into development, and released it all under the GPL. I think that they realize that their best shot at success is to promote Linux in general, rather than Red Hat Linux in particular, at least for the time being. By trying to compete with the other distributions head to head, they could wind up being counterproductive. Linux needs to be accepted as a viable option in the OS market for Red Hat to succeed. Once it is, I would expect to see more competition among the various distributors. Right now, I get the sense that it's a bit more of "all for one and one for all."

To: Jerry Whlan who wrote (168)	7/27/1999 6:09:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Respond to of 1794

Very few people in the open source community mistake the free in free software as having the same meaning as free beer, rather than free speech. Really? Go back and read some of the quotes in news stories that appeared when RedHat announced that they were going public. One whiner actually said that RedHat was violating the principles behind Linux because they cared about profits. Several other quotes were similar. I will grant you that this may have been only a handful of morons who got quoted because of the ridiculous nature of their comments.