First, let me thank everyone on this list for your feedback and many
personal contributions which have helped us to improve the quality of
our products and services. I'd also like to thank my fellow associates
at Red Hat, especially Florian LaRoche, for their hard work and for
their passion in keeping Red Hat true to its open source roots.
Yes, we are an open source company. We strive, and will continue to
strive to support the open source community, the open source development
model, and open source principles. We believe it to be a superior
model, and as a publicly traded open source company, we will strive to
maintain our core values and be fiscally responsible to the many
stakeholders we represent. Please continue to let us know where we may
have fallen astray - while I can't promise that we will do everything
you recommend, what I can promise is that we will take your suggestions
seriously and carefully consider them when we make our policy decisions.
On Monday, we announced the general availability of Red Hat Linux for
S/390, our branded distribution for the 31 bit mainframe architecture.
To encourage trial and experimentation of our operating system, we have
made available all of the signed packages that make up the distribution
on our public ftp sites, and many mirror sites around the world.
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.2/en/os/s390/
You are encouraged to download these packages at no cost, create the
necessary install images for your system, and conduct pilots and proof
of concept experiments. If you would like assistance with these pilots,
please feel free to contact our Professional Services organization.
Once customers are ready to deploy their linux servers in production
environments, our desire is that they will purchase one of our standard
or premium products, which include the distribution, software
maintenance, technical and defect support, and onsite installation in
prepackaged solution offerings. We have packaged these solutions in
this manner to help ensure that customers have the best possible
experience with our products.
For those ISVs and systems integrators that wish to obtain copies of our
distribution and some developer support so that they may port their
applications to our platform or more thoroughly evaluate our software,
please contact me directly and I will introduce you to those individuals
within our company who are responsible for our ISV and Preferred Partner
relationships.
Within the next few days, IBM will make available on their
DeveloperWorks site, some OCO modules (LCS, Qdio, and Qeth) that are
applicable for our newly announced distribution. I would like to
especially thank the IBM development teams in Boebligen and Poughkeepsie
for their responsiveness and cooperation in dealing with this difficult
issue. When we alerted IBM about a month ago that their OCO drivers
(2.4.7) were potentially in violation of the GPL and that the kernel
patch (arp_mac_map) which they submitted altered the standard interface
for how non-GPL and GPL code should interact and was thus rejected by
the maintainers of the kernel, they began working immediately to rewrite
their proprietary drivers to eliminate the dependency on the kernel
patch and recompile them to our latest kernel version. Ideally, we
would prefer for these drivers to be open sourced, but we understand
IBM's desire to keep them proprietary - for now :-)
We understand that high speed gigabit ethernet will be a requirement for
most of our enterprise customers, and we are thankful that IBM has taken
these extra steps to make this feature available for our distribution,
and in particular, in a manner which has allowed to us to not compromise
our open source principles. In the future, we will be working together
to ensure that our joint customers experience the highest quality of
service, and in the event of problems, a speedy resolution with a
minimum of finger pointing.
Thank you all again for your patience. This distribution has been long
overdue :-)
--
Kerry Kim
Red Hat, Inc. phone: 919-547-0012 x212
2600 Meridian Parkway fax: 919-547-0024
Durham, NC 27713 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
