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And that means dealing with the problem of Chinese and Japanese ideograms, or "characters." Rendering such characters on a computer screen requires a specific technical approach that is often not "natively" supported by the standard C libraries. Special patches have to be written to fix the problem -- and they must be rewritten for each new version of the C libraries. As Red Hat keeps releasing its own new distributions, TurboLinux has to scramble to keep up.

But is Red Hat pushing for the adoption of newer and newer versions of the C libraries out of some nefarious plot to keep the rest of the Linux world off-balance? Or is the company simply over-eager to move Linux technology forward?

According to Stephen Tweedie, a Linux kernel hacker employed by Red Hat, there is no plot.

"I have been working on Linux since the early days, long before Red Hat existed," says Tweedie, who is careful to note that he is speaking on his own behalf as a Linux kernel hacker, and not as a spokesman for Red Hat. "My first experience with a Red Hat distribution came when I needed to do a major upgrade of the libraries on my home machine. Red Hat were the first to come up with a distribution based on the new libraries."

"So from a user's point of view, in my case that rapid deployment of the new technologies was a positive blessing," says Tweedie. "To say that you don't want to use the new versions of the [C libraries] is to hide your head in the sand -- the libraries, like the rest of the Linux technology, are not developed by any Linux companies, and the community moves forward at different speeds."

The LSB's Dan Quinlan says that once the LSB finishes its specification for a standard Linux distribution, library incompatibilities should become less of a problem, because the specification will require that a particular configuration always be supported, and both application developers and distribution vendors will be able to depend on that. As for right now, Quinlan also doesn't see any evidence of serious misbehavior on the part of Red Hat.

"If Red Hat did anything really bad there would be a huge backlash against them," says Quinlan. "There's no evidence of such a backlash. I can't think of anything bad that they have done. They are definitely the biggest player in the Linux community now, and there's a potential for a big company stepping on a little company, but that doesn't mean they are being malicious. If all the kernel hackers at Red Hat resigned, then that would signal that something bad was happening."

At present, there seems to be little indication that Red Hat's kernel hackers are inclined to leave the company -- but that fact itself is another major concern for some of Red Hat's competitors. They are worried that Red Hat is stockpiling key Linux talent and thus gaining an advantage that could solidify its position as the dominant distribution vendor.

There's little debate that Red Hat employs some of the most famous names in Linux, excluding Torvalds himself. Although every Linux company with money to spend is aggressively hiring key open-source programmers, no other company can boast as big a concentration of Torvalds' so-called "top lieutenants." Alan Cox, David Miller, Steven Tweedie and Doug Ledford are among the most highly respected Linux kernel hackers you could name. Torvalds may make the ultimate kernel decisions -- ruling on questions such as what features will be included in a particular version, or when that particular version is considered finished -- but he also trusts programmers in the tier right below him to make their own decisions.

One of the reasons that Red Hat has been able to attract these programmers is by guaranteeing that all Red Hat additions to Linux are protected by the "GPL" -- the license that ensures that free software remains permanently accessible to all. But just making sure that code is free may not be enough, say some critics.

Lonn Johnston, vice president of marketing for TurboLinux, says that a representative of one "major hardware vendor" worried that Red Hat's dominance in the market could lead to the vendor getting "Microsoft-ed."

"This hardware vendor's argument," says Johnston, "was that if one distribution is successful in acquiring a disproportionate number of lieutenants ... then that talent pool is not only driving the development of the operating system, but is also advising Intel [and other hardware manufacturers] what to do with its future hardware direction and development. So that even if the source code that they produce is GPLed on release, you don't really know where they are going with it -- unless you are sitting in on those design meetings or development meetings."

In other words, Red Hat's market dominance, which is in large part predicated on its employment of famous hackers, leads naturally to access to information about hardware that other companies do not have. Red Hat can then tailor its code to work best on that hardware. Even if all the code is released to the general public, Red Hat is still the first on the block to be able to take advantage of it.

This is a real advantage -- but Red Hat isn't the only company playing this game. VA Linux Systems, which also boasts a sterling array of well-known Linux hackers on its staff, has also been leveraging its market position to give it access to proprietary hardware information. "I have the same strategy," says CEO Larry Augustin. "We do our best to get early access to chip design and other programming information, and we can then do the best Linux support for that. Part of the way we earn money is that that makes us first to market. We give away all the code, but we gain a technical support advantage. As the original author you can support it better."

"Red Hat does have the ability to get access to such information under NDA [non-disclosure agreement] in some cases," says Tweedie. "However, there is a very strict rule: Such NDAs can cover the development period only. As soon as the hardware and drivers are publicly released, all of the controlling source code must be opened completely -- without any intellectual property caveats -- to the public."

"Yes, some players in the commercial Linux world might get to certain technologies or drivers faster than others if they are actively contributing to their development," says Tweedie. "And yes, that means that other companies may feel that they are getting left behind if they don't make a positive decision to contribute to Linux themselves in the same way. However, I cannot see that it hurts Linux as a whole in any way whatsoever as long as the end results of all of these efforts are all being contributed back into the same mixing pool. Furthermore, I can't see any way to avoid this sort of thing if we are to be taken seriously by the industry."

Ultimately, it all comes down to the code.

"That's what I hang my hat on," says VA's Augustin. "If the code is GPLed it doesn't matter -- they [the Linux companies] can snipe at each other all they want -- the code is there. It will always be there, we can't take that away."

And that, in a nutshell, is why Red Hat is where it is, says Sam Ockman, CEO of Linux hardware vendor Penguin Computing. "Red Hat has a better record of GPLing all its code than any other commercial distribution ... Red Hat has always been the most free, the most GPLed, the most community supportive."

Should Red Hat ever make a serious misstep, says Ockman, the hackers will desert the company and some other distribution will pick up the mantle -- as well as all the code that Red Hat's hackers ever wrote. So even if an over-ambitious CEO goes overboard in seeking that extra competitive edge that could set his or her company sliding down the slippery slope toward Microsoftish no-holds-barred total market domination, that CEO may be unlikely to succeed.

Sure, the friction between individual companies will no doubt continue, and the sniping may reach hitherto unimagined intensity as the dollar amounts involved continue to rise; but again, that's only natural, and nothing to be afraid of. There's always the safety of free software -- the first, last and best weapon preventing any company in the Linux world from permanently calling the tune to which everyone else dances.
salon.com | July 14, 1999

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