Sun has been flirting with open source for a long time and its hiring of Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Project, in March this year, indicated that the company may at last be really serious about trying to improve its open source credentials to the point of full-scale acceptance by the FOSS community.

One of the biggest bugbears that developers have had with Sun is the bureaucracy involved in making contributions to OpenSolaris, Sun's community version of its well-known Unix. In an interview in January, Sun's open source software director Stephen Harpster explained: "The way it has worked for the last year and a half is that if you are not a Sun employee and you want to make a change to the source code what you have to do is e-mail your changes into a Sun employee and then the Sun employee has to apply the changes for you. Obviously that doesn't scale and is not desirable."

Red Hat has, thus far, not been half as bureaucratic in this area but with the release of Fedora 7.0, the company has gone the extra step. As it explained: "Fedora 7 is the first release where the development was one hundred and one per cent in the community. How? All the code was merged into a single external repository. Why? Same great distribution quality, even more high-quality developers able to work directly with the code and improve the flavor of over 7500 packages."

Another change in Red Hat's approach has been in its attitude to the KDE project. Ever since it went the way of a unified desktop environment nearly five years ago - instead of offering separate GNOME and KDE desktops with its distributions as it had been doing until then - there has been more than a perception that the company has been skewed towards the GNOME project when it comes to desktop components. Why, one KDE developer even quit the company when the Bluecurve desktop theme was first launched in October 2002.

With the release of Fedora 7, Bluecurve is no longer the default. And Red Hat has added an installable live KDE CD, which will definitely go a long way towards mollifying people in the KDE project. Getting developers onside is never a bad thing.

According to the KDE Dot News, Rex Dieter of KDE-RedHat  - an unofficial project set up to "promote the use of KDE and KDE-based applications on/for Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux through the creation and distribution of unofficial core and 3rd-party KDE RPM packages" - is now "co-maintaining the KDE packages with Red Hat's Than Ngo, bringing the packaging improvements from the KDE-RedHat project into the official Fedora packages."

This business of trying to cover one's flanks is something that Red Hat will have to do more and more as every commercial Linux company tries to muscle in on its marketshare. Last month, it was forced to announce a project called the Global Desktop in response to moves by Canonical (Ubuntu Linux) and Novell (SUSE Linux). Dell announced it would be selling both these distributions and Red Hat had to show that it had a response - pushing its business desktop into the consumer market with a different brand and a few tweaks here and there.

We'll see more and more of these little plays as 2008 comes in. There are a lot of companies, chief among them Microsoft, which would like to see a downturn in Red Hat's fortunes. But once the GPLv3 begins to be adopted, some of these predators may have to pause and guard their own flanks instead.

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