Peter C Norton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 1998 at 10:50:37AM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
>> On the other hand, I find Dan's work very impressive. Not perfect, by
>> any means, but far more intelligent, coherent, and robust than anything
>> Red Hat has produced.
> He's also producing a small set of utilities that interact with each
> other (doing it very well, too - no disagreement there). Comparing the
> scope and complexity of Dan's projects to an OS vendors mission is
> apples and oranges.
Red Hat is not an OS vendor in the classic sense. Red Hat is a marketing
company that happens to produce some neat packages along the way, but
their primary goal in life is to make something written by other people
into a product that people are willing to purchase. This has helped
dramatically in letting Linux (and free Unix in general) make in-roads
into places where it never has had a chance before.
What they've accomplished when viewed as a *marketing company* is
extremely impressive. I wouldn't evaluate them with a metric of veteran
programmers spending all their time writing code any more than I'd
evaluate Dan on how well he markets his product.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
