I don’t particularly like the use of “evil” WRT corporations. They are not moral entities and as such good and evil don’t apply in my book.
If corporations are to enjoy the legal, tax and other benefits of personhood, because “they are organizations of people, and the people should not be deprived of their constitutional rights when they act collectively”, then why shouldn’t the corporation (/those people involved) also be held to account for the moral and other consequences of their actions, in the same way individual persons are supposed to be? Isn’t that part of the contract between law, state, society and persons? I mean, to me the notion that a corporation should be treated as a person is just nuts, but if that’s how it is, and they’re going to get away with a bunch of crazy stuff because of it, shouldn’t the implementation be even-handed, or at least consistent? If so, don’t corporations therefore have moral obligations, just as all the people involved in them do?
I don’t really like “evil” as applied to anybody, corporation or individual. People can do bad things; to say that those people are bad frames things in a way that excludes the possibility that they could be doing good things at the same time, or that they could change. It’s really important to remember that most people’s actions and beliefs are a mix.
As in this example. :) I can dislike many of RedHat’s technical decisions while liking what they’ve done to spread acceptance of open-source. And I do. :)
I think it also distracts from where problems are & where solutions might be found. For example there’s a tendency in the more centrist parts of American liberalism to portray the various problems with financial capitalism as not being any real deep structural problem, but an issue of insufficient ethics, i.e. there are unfortunately some greedy and unscrupulous bankers and businesspeople, and that’s why we have problems. Which then suggests solutions that to me mostly miss the point, like requiring more ethics courses in MBA programs.
Wow so much this. I think it speaks to the basic human tendency to over simplify things. If you say “big finance is evil” then you get to white wash away a really complex swirl of regulatory, marketplace, and worldwide economic factors down to a simple declaration of blame.
The world is rarely black and white, almost always shades of gray.
Yes, definitely. Thank you for commenting, feoh, as I’d missed mjn’s important reply.
In addition to financial topics, I can think of a few other systemic injustices off the top of my head, and it’s absolutely correct that even the politicians who oppose them do so in a very narrow way. I see no reason politics should have to do this compromise thing, but … well, for the history of how this is actually intentional right now, read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way and related topics.
I believe that their business model is to take advantage of large corporations and state entities that have money and are willing to pay premium just so that they don’t have to keep their own competent personnel in order to have certain guarantees. They then take this money and fund development of the kernel, system infrastructure, virtualization, containers and desktop environment.
One of their long-term bets was the virtualization infrastructure that is just beginning to pay off.
Other long-term bet they made a few years back is the Linux desktop. I see it mainly as a way to provide the developers a better environment, capitalizing on their aggregate output all over the ecosystem, but we might see some serious client-side deployment eventually. In 10-15 years many government institutions will have moved past the Word-centric workflows, towards integrated web-based platforms that simply won’t require Windows installations anymore. I can see a lot of potential in there.
They are probably the only vendor who can help us lobby the governments to use open source software more, too.
I believe that their business model is to take advantage of large corporations and state entities that have money and are willing to pay premium just so that they don’t have to keep their own competent personnel in order to have certain guarantees. They then take this money and fund development of the kernel, system infrastructure, virtualization, containers and desktop environment.
It’s more the fact they actually want that explicitly. Not only do you not have to employ as many (or as competent) IT workers, but Red Hat theoretically is on the hook for any fuckups with their software - the big sell to most.
Do you really see Redhat as being a significant backer in the LInux desktop space? I wouldn’t think of them in those terms but I wouldn’t doubt it either.
It seems to me that Ubuntu has done more innovation there, but they’ve also made a right mess of things (I speak as a partially blind person who has bludgeoned himself bloody trying to use Unity, gave up and went back to the Mac :)
As somebody who occasionally works with some of the software that’s been “improved” by red hat, I’m not sure I like their business model.
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I would cynically describe their business model not as supporting open source, but as turning open source into something that needs support.
I don’t particularly like the use of “evil” WRT corporations. They are not moral entities and as such good and evil don’t apply in my book.
That said, I’ve found RH to be a class act and one of the most pleasant vendors I’ve ever dealt with on a regular basis.
If corporations are to enjoy the legal, tax and other benefits of personhood, because “they are organizations of people, and the people should not be deprived of their constitutional rights when they act collectively”, then why shouldn’t the corporation (/those people involved) also be held to account for the moral and other consequences of their actions, in the same way individual persons are supposed to be? Isn’t that part of the contract between law, state, society and persons? I mean, to me the notion that a corporation should be treated as a person is just nuts, but if that’s how it is, and they’re going to get away with a bunch of crazy stuff because of it, shouldn’t the implementation be even-handed, or at least consistent? If so, don’t corporations therefore have moral obligations, just as all the people involved in them do?
I don’t really like “evil” as applied to anybody, corporation or individual. People can do bad things; to say that those people are bad frames things in a way that excludes the possibility that they could be doing good things at the same time, or that they could change. It’s really important to remember that most people’s actions and beliefs are a mix.
As in this example. :) I can dislike many of RedHat’s technical decisions while liking what they’ve done to spread acceptance of open-source. And I do. :)
I think it also distracts from where problems are & where solutions might be found. For example there’s a tendency in the more centrist parts of American liberalism to portray the various problems with financial capitalism as not being any real deep structural problem, but an issue of insufficient ethics, i.e. there are unfortunately some greedy and unscrupulous bankers and businesspeople, and that’s why we have problems. Which then suggests solutions that to me mostly miss the point, like requiring more ethics courses in MBA programs.
Wow so much this. I think it speaks to the basic human tendency to over simplify things. If you say “big finance is evil” then you get to white wash away a really complex swirl of regulatory, marketplace, and worldwide economic factors down to a simple declaration of blame.
The world is rarely black and white, almost always shades of gray.
Yes, definitely. Thank you for commenting, feoh, as I’d missed mjn’s important reply.
In addition to financial topics, I can think of a few other systemic injustices off the top of my head, and it’s absolutely correct that even the politicians who oppose them do so in a very narrow way. I see no reason politics should have to do this compromise thing, but … well, for the history of how this is actually intentional right now, read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way and related topics.
I believe that their business model is to take advantage of large corporations and state entities that have money and are willing to pay premium just so that they don’t have to keep their own competent personnel in order to have certain guarantees. They then take this money and fund development of the kernel, system infrastructure, virtualization, containers and desktop environment.
One of their long-term bets was the virtualization infrastructure that is just beginning to pay off.
Other long-term bet they made a few years back is the Linux desktop. I see it mainly as a way to provide the developers a better environment, capitalizing on their aggregate output all over the ecosystem, but we might see some serious client-side deployment eventually. In 10-15 years many government institutions will have moved past the Word-centric workflows, towards integrated web-based platforms that simply won’t require Windows installations anymore. I can see a lot of potential in there.
They are probably the only vendor who can help us lobby the governments to use open source software more, too.
It’s more the fact they actually want that explicitly. Not only do you not have to employ as many (or as competent) IT workers, but Red Hat theoretically is on the hook for any fuckups with their software - the big sell to most.
Do you really see Redhat as being a significant backer in the LInux desktop space? I wouldn’t think of them in those terms but I wouldn’t doubt it either.
It seems to me that Ubuntu has done more innovation there, but they’ve also made a right mess of things (I speak as a partially blind person who has bludgeoned himself bloody trying to use Unity, gave up and went back to the Mac :)