Red Hat not Interested in Publishing Id Games

John Carmack wrote in to send me an email that he received from Bob Young at Red Hat. He says "I was dissapointed to receive this today... We aren't interested in being out own publisher, and I want to work with a linux specialist that can provide customer support. If any of the other major linux companies want to pitch us a publishing offer, I want to hear from them." Red Hats reply is below. Hopefully there's a company out there willing to make a ton of money distributing id's games...

Update My opinion on this whole matter is that Red Hat did the right thing. Bob's opinions on why RH wouldn't want to publish Id's stuff are fair. I'm sorry this seems to be interpreted as negative, my intent by posting this was merely to help John find another Linux Publisher.

I've yanked the letter because it was personal email between John & Bob and it was clearly inappropriate for me to post it here. Beyond that, it had phone numbers that weren't meant for publishing.

Red Hat doesn't want distribute Id's games because

• They are trying to be a more serious company, and games arent where that is right now.
• Quake is binary only, and RH is trying to distribute only open stuff.

both of these seem completely reasonable to me, and I'm glad that RH is willing to stick to their guns on this one. My intent of posting this story was merely to help John find an alternative publisher for Linux Quake, and I hope he's successful. I want to see a shrink wrapped Linux Quake available at Babbages right next to the windows version more than anything.

My apologies again to everyone involved. I've proved once again that I'm human, and error prone.