A Red Hat Software Inc spokesperson called today to confirm that the company is not negotiating a merger with fellow Linux distributor Caldera Inc (CI No 3,446). That will disappoint free software community members who have been debating the pros and cons of such a deal all week. One posting to a mailing list deemed the rumor: Unlikely. A short trip to LinuxExpo shows just how narrow the tightrope is that Red Hat walks. If they venture too far to the commercial side they risk alienating their core programming team (ie, the t- shirted, blue-jean-clad hackers at LinuxExpo). If they venture too far to the hacker side, they risk losing their commercial clients. But another poster retorted: Frankly, I think the only group that would benefit from the merger would be Caldera. Unlike Red Hat, this poster argues, Caldera has a low profile in the Linux community and in the Unix community as a whole.
