From the «still miss Redneck Install» department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: Red Hat's 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an
Apartment-Based Startup
Author: EditorDavid
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 18:53:00 -0400
Link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/04/29/1918218/red-hats-30th-anniversary-how-a-microsoft-competitor-rose-from-an-apartment-based-startup?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a
special four-part series of articles. In the first article Red Hat co-founder
Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of
the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of
the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest
technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product
of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North
Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to
learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source
software. "Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's
engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have,"
Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system
engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by
comparison...." Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson
with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a
recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized
Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right
direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product.
Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York
City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who
was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses
together." Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees
operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the
landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out. The four articles
capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design
parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes
with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red
Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We
were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael
Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were
corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and
IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the
eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to
over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."
But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red
Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's
mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that
era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings
like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the
Microsoft Goliath." Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall
Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their
computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild
with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the
latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of
Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more
than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former
critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to
integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side
of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can
say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said. In the
2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After
years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt
good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said. "But there was always pride." In
2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

[image 2][2] [image 4][4]

Read more of this story[5] at Slashdot.

Links:
[1]: http://twitter.com/home?status=Red+Hat%27s+30th+Anniversary%3A++How+a+Microsoft+Competitor+Rose+from+an+Apartment-Based+Startup+%3A+https%3A%2F%2Flinux.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F23%2F04%2F29%2F1918218%2F%3Futm_source%3Dtwitter%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter (link)
[2]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png (image)
[3]: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Flinux.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F23%2F04%2F29%2F1918218%2Fred-hats-30th-anniversary-how-a-microsoft-competitor-rose-from-an-apartment-based-startup%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook (link)
[4]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png (image)
[5]: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/04/29/1918218/red-hats-30th-anniversary-how-a-microsoft-competitor-rose-from-an-apartment-based-startup?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)

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First rule of Usenet: you do not talk about Usenet

I miss Bluecurve

On 19/05/2023 12:20, Ander GM wrote:
> I miss Bluecurve

what is bluecurve?

On Fri, 19 May 2023 13:20:08 +0200
Ander GM <anthk@disroot.org> wrote:

> I miss Bluecurve

Funny you should mention that. Earlier this year I installed RedHat 8 in
a VM and was impressed how good looking and usable it was. That was a
great distro.

In those days I used SuSE more though, and the boxed sets had a huge
amount of software on them - fun times.