Krishnan M <kmlist@...> writes:
But the carefree winds that once fanned the free flow of ideas, the plentiful showers that nourished the soil, the rivers that brought it prosperity, and the abundant sunshine that provided energy soon decided to shun those parts that lay within the fence. The goodwill of the many failed to reach the people inside the fence, not that it was ever withheld... Slowly, the land within became barren, ..., and failed...
This sounds like RedHat Linux? Right!? Ask yourselves, would Linux be where it is without RedHat? And, of course, if you do not care for RedHat, do what I do, use CentOS. It is *very* stable - and free! The stability would not be there without RedHat, and it would not be honest to say CentOS is possible without RedHat. IBM has been a big player with Linux. The large corporate sponsorships are important if a project is going to mature. While 20 years ago I would have agreed that corporations should stay out of anything DIY (open source), now I can say that corporate sponsorships and grants are why many open source projects are actually good. We aren't talking about some romantic poetic notion here - like the meaning of life. We are talking about software which when you look at it, is basically a type of machine, an invention. And without proper backing, all ideas eventually end up as footnotes in the lists of all possible inventions. Darrell Ulm