At the end of the week, after sifting through all the awards, self-righteous speeches, come late to the party dressed in early adopter talk one story stood out as straight from the gut, this is how it is, and it is good.

I didn't attend Linux World this year. I've gone previously, but ended up trying to engage with models that a company (name withheld to protect the guilty) had sent to talk to customers and to smile and nod knowingly. Yeck.

Tom Adelstein has confirmed my worst fears about going... that it would be nothing but a showcase of how much all the companies are behind Linux and how it is the profit engine of their future. Not to mention try to imply that Linux is the success it is because of their involvement. Rah! Rah! Rah! I welcome commercial interests, but gimme a break!

At the end of the week, after sifting through all the awards, self-righteous speeches, come late to the party dressed in early adopter talk one story stood out as straight from the gut, this is how it is, and it is good.

Redhat's VP of open source affairs Michael Tiemann stepped up to the plate and said in not so few words, that the company messed up. It messed up big time, is sorry, and is trying to make amends. Where they messed up was abandoning their 'freebie' Redhat version two years ago to focus exclusively on their enterprise "pay up big time" version. While doing this their CEO basically also said desktop users should stick to Windows. Ouch!

Needless to say, in hindsight, this was not exactly the wisest thing to do or say. Novell stepped in very shortly thereafter and filled that 'freebie' version need, along with Gentoo, Mandrake, and other numerous flavors of Linux. Crucial Redhat supporters were offended, and shortly off to greener pastures. Realizing the gaff Redhat half-heartedly supported the Fedora project. The 'freebie' version under a new name. Some Redhat supporters changed the decals on their PC towers, but not all.

Well Redhat says it is back with religion to support these early-adopters with the Fedora project. Is it out of the goodness of their hearts? Well, not exactly, but the outcome is the same. Tiemann explained, "One of the mistakes we made when we launched this Enterprise Linux product was we focused so exclusively on this enterprise market that we left this (early-adopter customer) square uncovered. It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation." Will the motivation matter to Fedora users? Probably not.

So, what's the plan? Well.... that's not exactly clear. There's talk about how Fedora will be expanded to include "extras" - an additional software repository, and support for additional architectures. Was that going to happen anyway? Again, that's likely. A community has built up around Fedora despite Redhat treating it like an ugly love-child at times.

What's important here is that among the hot air there was some straight talk to cling to. We have only to watch the actions of Redhat to see if it materializes into something equally good.

-Steve Mallett, Founder and Managing Editor - OSDir.com