Eggs, Sausage, and Spam

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Sat, 18 Dec 1999 09:19:32 -0500 (EST)

Gregory Alan Bolcer writes:
> STOP the madness! What possible value would Red Hat have
> for Be other than nifty graphical desktop? Red Hat's sole
> money making product that IMHO truly ads value to their company
> is the Red Hat Secure Server.

I guess it depends what you mean by value-added. Red Hat Secure
Server is off-the-shelf Apache plus off-the-shelf patches; the only
value they add to that is a few bundled admin widgets and, more
significantly, the RSA license. Compare to software produced by Red
Hat themselves (the obvious examples are RPM and the work they've
contributed to GNOME) --- that's stuff which has added a whole lot
more value to their core Linux distributions. (And other peoples' as
well, but hey, that's the open-source community).

rst