Red Hat Pushes Education

Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., Durham, N.C., wants to establish a nonprofit organization that would introduce Linux and open source software to the education market.

Speaking at LinuxWorld 2001 in San Francisco Aug. 30, Red Hat president and chief executive officer Matthew Szulik said the organization should be modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps., the 1930s government effort to provide jobs for Americans through improving and conserving the nation's natural resources.

In the organization proposed by Szulik, public educators and local school boards would work together to improve the quality of local technical education, bypassing proprietary, high-cost vendors. He was critical of proprietary software vendors for treating schools as a marketplace, "not as a responsibility."