Enterprise Unix Roundup: A Red Hat Retrospective

You’ve probably read a lot about Red Hat’s latest Linux release already, so we’re not going to go down the laundry list of features for you here. It’s
enough to say that with support for 32-way servers, address space limitations that have soared to 256GB, and support for big iron across several
platforms, the company’s taken another step forward in what seems to be an endless Linux process: arriving.

What’s the most interesting about Red Hat’s news this week is how with the release of its Enterprise Linux 3 product — and recent changes in approach
— Red Hat is looking like a 21st century Linux company more than it ever has.

We remember our first Red Hat experience with some fondness. It involved Red Hat 4.2 (released in May 1997), and after some time spent slaving away in
older, creakier distributions, much about the way Red Hat went about its business seemed like a revelation. It was clearly a company bent on taming
Linux. It’s a comment on the state of the Linux world at that point that Red Hat was regularly decried as having some sort of corrupting influence
thanks to the way it made installing software, for instance, easier than seemed decent to Unix graybeards and assorted other neo-Calvinists.