Today, Red Hat is considered a good citizen of the open source community and while it has its detractors, it is widely acknowledged as the one company which has made a big contribution to spreading the use of Linux in the enterprise. The company's community project, Fedora, has also helped its profile.

The deal that Novell inked with Microsoft earlier this month has been manna from heaven for Red Hat - if developers of free and open source software had to pick between Novell and Red Hat, there is no question about whom they would support. The community is solidly behind Red Hat now.

Red Hat has taken a rather aggressive attitude to an offer from Microsoft for a similar deal, shooting it down without any hesitation. In fact, one of its legal eagles in the US, Mark Webbink, was bold enough to predict to the SearchOpenSource website: "...let's see where we all are a year from now. We will still be standing. We still believe that we will be the dominant player in the Linux market because, by that time, there won't be any other Linux players. We will have succeeded once again."

Max McLaren, general manager of Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand, while personally confused about the deal - "since Novell claims it is not about patents" - is of the opinion that it was merely a case of grabbing a financial lifeline, "any lifeline." To McLaren the deal does not make sense.

The difference between Red Hat and most of the other players in the enterprise Linux space, McLaren says, is that open source is Red Hat's primary business. For the others it is an ancillary.