Red Hat’s dominance is worrisome to some industry players, who say the Raleigh, N.C., company needs effective competition to prevent it from becoming a Microsoft Corp. among Linux vendors and to ensure the operating system continues to develop in an open way.
And who wouldn’t want to have MSFT’s influence over their market? Can you fault RedHat for that?
But the openness of the source itself and the fact there are competing distributions — RedHat vs SuSE is not like Macintosh vs Windows, after all — doesn’t really convince me that RedHat is a monopoly. I hope never to run RedHat again: the pain of dealing with RPM is still fresh in my mind. If I couldn’t get what I needed from FreeBSD’s Linux emulation, I’d go with Debian or SuSE.