The news report is still very confusing (to me anyway), but it appears
that there won't be RedHat 10:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/22/1712227.shtml?tid=106&tid=110&tid=185&tid=187
Instead, consumers will have Federa 1.x, and business users RedHat
Enterprise 3.
I had been wondering how RedHat could support its market cap of almost 2
billion dollars if it continues its current way of doing business.
Such a move (if my reading of the aformentioned event is correct) is
indeed not only logical, but also inevitable. Supporting the consumer
version of Linux takes extremely large amounts of effort, but has a very
low profit margin, if at all. RedHat certainly has grown to the level
where it no longer has to count on selling the retail packages for revenues.
But a much bigger issue is about the Red Hat trademark. Because RedHat
Linux is GPL'd, RedHat cannot stop other from repackaging, indeed RedHat
encourages others to repackage, RedHat Linux. This then runs into the
trademark problem. RedHat considers its trademark its most important
asset. If RedHat continues to distribute the consumer version of RedHat
Linux, sooner or later RedHat will have to come to bridge of having to
sue those third party re-packagers. Otherwise, as a matter of law (for
lack of due diligence in enforcement), RedHat will lose its trademark
right. (Has anyone ever wondered why we can freely use the name
"Aspirin", but not "Tylenol"?)
First we had Mozilla/Netscape, then OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. Now we
have RedHat/Fedora. Linux is evolving, not only technologically, but in
terms of the way of doing sustainable business.
