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Open source

The ups and downs of cloning Red Hat

The bad news for Red Hat is that programmers now routinely produce clones of the company's premium version of Linux. But the company believes it's actually good news.

CentOS and several other organizations are drafting off Red Hat's work to build a stable version of Linux with long-term support. Red Hat believes the projects can help attract new customers to its own products, but many are perfectly happy the clones and tech support by mailing list and search engines.

News.com will report more on this development Thursday.

Fedora for Itanium taking baby steps

An effort to extend Red Hat's Fedora version of Linux to computers using Intel's Itanium processors is getting under way. A lead programmer, Silicon Graphics employee Prarit Bhargava, has established a mailing list, and is trying to coax Red Hat to release an Itanium version of its "rawhide" prototype Linux.

Fedora is Red Hat's fast-changing version of Linux, intended to attract outside programming involvement and to mature new technology quickly. Fedora today supports x86 processors such as Intel's Pentium and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, and the forthcoming Fedora Core 4 will extend to IBM's Power processors … Read more