Is Red Hat becoming Linux's Microsoft?

Hardly. But as the lovey-dovey Linux business matures, elbows are beginning to fly.

By Andrew Leonard

Jul 14, 1999 | The hardcore geeks chuckled when the prizes were passed out near the end of the June Bay Area Linux Users Group meeting. LinuxCare, a fast-growing start-up specializing in support for the Linux-based operating system, was giving away free copies of a perky promotional poster featuring a naked woman guarding her buttocks with a Debian Linux CD-ROM. The point being, of course, that if you choose to purchase LinuxCare support services, you've covered your ass.

The poster was a parody of this spring's notorious Simply Palm advertising campaign for the Palm V handheld computer. But the geeks weren't giggling at the naked lady. Instead, they were appreciating a more subtle stab of humor: a LinuxCare dig at Red Hat, the U.S. market leader in packaged Linux distributions. Just three weeks earlier, at the Linux Expo in North Carolina in late May, LinuxCare had earned Red Hat's ire by distributing copies of a similar poster that displayed a Red Hat CD-ROM.

Red Hat -- a company that also plans to generate revenue from selling Linux support services -- did not appreciate the humor inherent in its trademark being emblazoned on a risque poster advertising the services of a direct competitor. So Red Hat summoned its lawyers. The posters had to come down.

Lawyers? Cease-and-desist threats? In the cozy world of Linux, where every other hacker takes joy in proclaiming membership in the "community" and promises that the nasty old rules of greedy capitalism will soon be rewritten? How could this be?

Yes, it's been clear for at least a year that the Linux start-up scene is fast maturing into a serious commercial battleground. But one of the elements fueling that growth is the widespread belief that the rise of Linux -- and all open-source software -- offers something different from the same old fangs-bared, cutthroat business bullshit.

On the bulletin boards and mailing lists where every Red Hat move is dissected in voluminous detail, some critics suggested that Red Hat's heavy-handed behavior was yet one more sign that Red Hat is evolving into the Microsoft of Linux. It's not the first time such charges -- the worst invective that the free-software world can spew -- have been leveled at Red Hat. But in most cases, the charges have little merit: They're usually spouted by hormonally turbo-charged juvenile delinquents looking to stir up some flames.

Now, however, the Linux marketplace is exploding. Red Hat has already filed for a public stock offering, and other Linux companies are sure to follow. Two competing Linux distribution vendors, TurboLinux and S.u.S.E., are aggressively reaching out from their home bases in Asia and Europe into the North American market. Newcomers like LinuxCare, fueled by massive venture capital investment, have rocketed onto the scene. The symptoms of hypergrowth are everywhere: Companies are staffing up, stuffing new hires in every available office nook and cranny, and struggling madly to manage the pain of pell-mell expansion.

Pity the market leader in such a climate. Red Hat spokeswoman Melissa London laughs at the Microsoft comparison:

"It's so funny -- when was the last time you saw Microsoft make its operating system available for free download and remain committed to that? Our commitment to that is going to speak for itself. We take a fair amount of shots because we are in a leadership position, but this is too exciting a position to muck it up with Machiavellian initiatives."

Still, now more than ever before, Red Hat is facing pointed scrutiny, and not just from loudmouth programmers trolling online discussion forums. Red Hat's competitors are also asking questions. Does Red Hat support efforts to create a common standard for Linux? Or does its high-profile employment of top "inner circle" Linux hackers give the company an unfair advantage in determining just what that standard is? Is Red Hat purposely making it hard for other distribution vendors to keep up? Is it positioning itself to be the single dominant player in a market that prides itself on its wild diversity?

Judging from a close look at the evidence, the answers to these questions are mixed: Yes, Red Hat is striving as best it can to gain a competitive advantage, but no, it is no Microsoft. And it may well never be -- as long as the code stays free.

But there's also no question that the Linux kids are growing up. The poster brouhaha may well have been just a silly spat, but its symbolism is potent. The stakes in the Linux game are rising, and so is the friction.

Next Page: Red Hat and LinuxCare tussle over Linux standards

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