Ask Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik 666
Red Hat has made several changes in how they run their business, notably concentrating more (perhaps one might say "entirely") on enterprise-level Linux users. Some of Red Hat's moves have upset long-time users, and many people seem to have trouble understanding exactly where Fedora fits into all this. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik has offered to answer your questions and clear things up, so ask away. Please don't ask questions he's answered in recent interviews and statements, and try -- hard though this may be for some -- to ask only one question per post. We'll forward 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Szulik tomorrow, and run his answers when he gets them back to us.
I have a question... (Score:2, Insightful)
SOHO Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have at least a half-dozen entitlements -- faithfully renewed each year. I've offered a few of my paid-for entitlements to clients, for free, as part of my service. My plan has been to expand this to more of my clients in the near future. But now, I feel stuck.
These are mom & pop shops (in the dozens) who will NEVER be able to afford your Enterprise offer. They wouldn't know how to keep their Red Hat, back-office server up-to-date if it meant saving their business. I make a living by saving these people from hours and hours of servicing Microsoft patches, updates and malware. If you will not be effectively supporting the SOHO market (including my clients), what do you recommend?!
SOHOs know "Red Hat". I will have to teach them "Mandrake", "SuSE", or perhaps maybe not so much "Novell", instead. I believe today's SOHOs are tomorrow's Enterprise buyers. What do you believe?
Re:SOHO Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you didn't make money doing this, would you still do it? RedHat didn't make enough money providing updates for their desktop distribution, so they stopped doing it. Seems rational to me.
There's no sign up process for Fedora because it's no longer required, not because it's going away. What has changed is who's responsible for providing updates. It's now not RedHat's sole responsiblity, it's a community process just like Debian.
You need to take a deep breath, relax, and read the information at http://fedora.redhat.com [redhat.com]
Re:SOHO Support? (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel like a peoplesoft customer, who are facing the loss of huge investments in time and money if Oracle succeeds in buying them out.
Fedora (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fedora (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the real issue is whether or not he meant "home desktop" vs. "corporate desktop". The corporate desktop is one where the admins have very tight controls over how the desktop works and there is a good deal of consistency across different boxes. The home desktop is a totally different beast. You have home users who want to do silly things like plug in USB cameras, scanners and play the latest games and media content. For those users, sadly, *RedHat* Linux
Re:Fedora (Score:3, Insightful)
We're talking about OS's. The Director of Information Technology was once a help desk guy, or at least a network admin. HE is the one making the OS recommendations, for servers and clients alike.
And guess what - he uses a computer at home.
More importantly, his replacement 5 years from now uses a computer at home.
The upper and middle IT management of today are the network admins of 5 years ago. 5 year plans, people. 5 years ago, these folks started playing with linux - m
Why (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
It's common place for a company to produce many products and for some to lose money but the company to come out with a profit thanks to the other products.
By getting rid of the "losers" the company can raise profits by doing "less"
Linux on the desktop? (Score:3, Interesting)
Question... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you know what the answer will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
This, and a number of other highly-rated questions where the answer is "Fedora" (followed by what will boil down to some hype for Fedora), should probably be moderated "Overrated" in the interest of presenting questions for which the answers the Red Hat CEO will give are not immediately obvious.
(Normally I wouldn't question moderation, but in interviews mods are more like votes, so this is a valid opinion.)
(And of course, in the event this gets rated highly it does not constitute a question.)
up2date (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:up2date (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:up2date (Score:3, Informative)
Return on RHN Entitlements? (was Re:up2date) (Score:5, Interesting)
linux's enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
Timing (Score:4, Interesting)
Opportunity for small business (Score:5, Interesting)
Red Hat and Fedora (Score:5, Interesting)
What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)
Making my own RHEL variant? (Score:5, Interesting)
I (and thousands upon thousands of others) felt comfortable with RH's excellent QA and support. Now that this is only available in RHEL, how would you react to the community creating a freely-distributale RHEL variant? In other words, strip out the copyrighted bits, use the errata SRPMs to produce updates, and offer users with a robust, cheap and long-term supported distro.
This may cause problems with your core business, and I respect greatly the work RH does on GCC, GNOME, glibc, XFree86 etc., but I can see a group getting just enough dissatisfied to create such a distro.
MSa
Someone's already doing that (Score:3, Informative)
Someone's already doing a "white box" version of RHEL. He asked not to post a link on slashdot as the beta ISOs are hosted on a pretty narrow pipe.
Re:Someone's already doing that (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what IBM did. (Score:2)
Where this differs from OS/2 is that there are others producing end user version of Linux so that small end users are not left in the cold.
Emphasis on the General Linux community (Score:5, Interesting)
Server without Desktop? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the (many) factors leading to Microsoft dominance was that they had, from the user's perspective, essentially the same operating system on the desktop and the server, in that they ran the same software; And recently, Microsoft has provided literally the same software on desktop and server. RedHat began with a general-purpose product, and then moved to an artificial separation between desktop and server as Microsoft now has, and has since moved to providing only the Server. Do you feel that this is a necessary product of the differences between open and closed source models, or is it simply the right position for RedHat to take, and not the rest of the Open Source Unix community?
Leaving users' market for profitability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your exit from the desktop Linux market was an attempt to focus the company on enterprise editions, which bring in more contracts and revenues.
How big of a business was desktop Linux for you in the first place and what was your revenue structure in that market? How much do you expect to add to bottom line by concentrating on enterprise market?
Will Linux be RedHat's Only Core? (Score:5, Interesting)
Enterprise? (Score:2)
My question: Why use the word "Enterprise" when the clearer and simpler "business" means the same thing?
Fedora, Rawhide, and Legacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Business Model for non-Enterprise Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
How have you helped Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey Matt (Score:2, Informative)
Do you see... (Score:2, Interesting)
Question of Mr Szulik (Score:4, Interesting)
Two way street between Fedora and Enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)
You have mentioned that there would be a sort of quid pro quo between Fedora and your Enterprise line: in return for the community support for Fedora as a "testing ground" for Enterprise Linux, Fedora will get some engineering and management support from Red Hat. It's not that I doubt your honesty, but I'm worried that if I were to contribute to Fedora, those contributions might get sucked into an enterprise distribution I could never afford while Fedora support ends up falling by the wayside. How two-way will the street be, and are there any assurances that it will keep being two-way?
SCO (Score:2)
If you could go back in time. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you could go back in time with the knowledge you have to day, and live the dot-com years for a second time. What would you change in RedHat's business model ?
Re:If you could go back in time. (Score:4, Funny)
Will Red Hat become more proprietary? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the strengths of Red Hat has always been its emphasis on Free software. Unlike, say, SuSE, which contains significant pieces of SuSE-only infrastructure (such as YaST), Red Hat has always been more careful not to "Weld The Hood Shut". This is one reason we recommend Red Hat to customers at work.
Will we continue to see this, or will Red Hat start trying to beat the competition with proprietary add-ons?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
This is a FAQ (Score:2)
HP, Dell etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that the most important thing to gain widespread acceptance of Linux is for the big PC manufacturers to promote and factory install it.
We used to hear that when companies such as Dell and HP were approached about this, they would be very hesitant about it, probably due to fear of what Microsoft might do in retaliation.
Is this still the case? Do you think we are ever going to see Dell offering Linux as an option on their standard desktops, for example?
Diverse Hardware Support (Score:5, Interesting)
Giving back to the community (Score:4, Interesting)
Mr. CEO Guy (Score:5, Interesting)
AND, if its NOT ready for the desktop, what will you run on YOUR desktop?
Did The Consumer Stream Make A Profit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Standardization? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is inevitable that standardization will continue to occur -- things have gotten much better over the last few years -- but do you see Red Hat changing to fit Linux or Linux changing to fit Red Hat in the future?
Upset is a understatement (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not seeing a roadmap out of RedHat that I am comfortable with.On top of that I am spitting mad about his desktop comments a few days ago!
Package management in RH's future (Score:3, Interesting)
Since apt4rpm works very well, once installed, have you considered a greater use for apt vs. RPMs in Fedora / future versions of whatever products end up with the Red Hat label? Mandrake's URPMI does a great, similar job, too. I like the automatic dependency checking that this type of package manager brings, and Synaptic is one of the nicest package management front ends I've seen.
timothy
abandoning linux on the desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
My question is about application installation (Score:2, Interesting)
Novell + Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
public vs private (Score:4, Interesting)
Has being a public company altered your business decisions? Obviously, the infusion of cash allowed for greater growth, made it easy to buy other companies, and made unprofitability possible. But has meeting the streets demands adversly affected your business decisions?
General Desktop functionality (Score:2, Interesting)
What about making CD sets and DVDs available (Score:2)
I like the idea, it just bites when Severn burned fine and Fedora won't.
personal OS choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
thanks in advance for your honest and direct answer.
Consumer distributions (Score:2)
Where should Redhat desktop users go next? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been purchasing and promoting RedHat Linux as a desktop alternative and it appears from recent official statements that RedHat is abandoning the desktop effort. I know the RedHat has recently annouced Fedora as a replacement to the boxed RedHat distribution which is supposed to be community based.
In my experience as an RHCE, Redhat has done very little to promote a sense of community among it's users or RHCE's. A year ago, RedHat started some online forumns to start the community building processes but, the forumns were very short lived (2 months). Based on all this, where should the users and believers in a desktop Linux solution go next and, what is Redhat doing to and build an effective user/developer community around Fedora? Also, can you comment on the response that Fedora has received so far?
Before you re-invent the wheel.. (Score:2)
What is Red Hat Professional Workstation? (Score:2)
Education and Research Markets (Score:5, Interesting)
We have twice, over the past few years, attempted to contact Red Hat regarding site licensing or educational volume licensing for access to Red Hat Network. Both times the answer has been that -- unlike Sun, Microsoft, Apple, and our other OS suppliers -- Red Hat has no licensing programs for the education and science markets. For this reason, we have turned our Red Hat Linux users away from Red Hat Network and towards FreshRPMs APT [freshrpms.net] as a source of regular software updates.
With the discontinuation of the Red Hat Linux product line, we are now at an impasse. We do not expect FreshRPMs to conjure up security and bug-fix updates for a system that will no longer be supported upstream. My clients would prefer a more guaranteed solution than FreshRPMs. However, Red Hat still shows no signs of interest in the education and research market. Fedora is not an option, as we can't expect our science staff to accept major upgrades every 2-3 months -- they are science nerds, not Linux nerds.
Is there any chance that your plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux include site- and volume-licensing oriented at the educational and research community? For if not, my colleagues and I will have a hard row to hoe -- migrating existing Red Hat Linux users to supportable distributions such as SuSE or Mandrake.
Educational Market (Score:3, Informative)
I'd like to encourage RedHat to continue to make an educational/research oriented distribution at a nicely low price that I can continue to recommend to students, as well as to those faculty (both CS and not so much) who might be interested in
Re:Education and Research Markets (Score:3, Insightful)
What differentiates ES from AS or WS? (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes Enterprise ES more attractive than either WS or AS, or even Fedora? Your website only makes vague short descriptions of each of the variants, and I have yet to find any advantage that ES may hold over its two peers. Even partners like Oracle are reluctant/refusing to support ES.
One thing that would make a huge difference to us involved in purchasing Linux would be more detailed technical descriptions on your website. Even just having a package listing would I think relieve much confusion.
Bitter People... (Score:3, Interesting)
Academics... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a professor at a Big-10 University, I now find myself in the curious situation that RedHat, for either server or workstation usage, is more expensive than Windows, owing to the terms that MS offers academia and the new licensing of RH products. Most Universities can _purchase_ Win2k3 Server for the price of one year of RHEL WS support.
Does academia constitute one more market segment that RH is no longer contesting?
licensing issues (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I run Redhat across a rather large ( > 4000 CPUs ) cluster, and have never bothered doing more than buying a few boxed sets due to the fact that I have never been able to get a reasonable price from your sales team. Cluster support tends to be more like dealing w/ a single machine, since the hardware is generational ( if you add 512 CPUs to the system, their hardware is going to be exactly the same if you ordered it that way ). Why should I pay a license for each machine, when I can just get a license for one that is having the same problem as the others ( for example, a bizarre problem we had w/ the eepro100 driver + PVM - and yes, I know PVM is generally used for > 1 machine, but technically I probably could have addressed the support problem w/ 1 license ). I wouldn't have a problem buying cluster support if you had a decent sliding scale ( ex. : 512 nodes @ $50/node, 1024 nodes @ $35/node, etc. ). And of course, have a caching update server for the site.
And for universities : if you want brand recognition, try offering site licenses or educational discounts. Don't count on all CS/EE students to be clued in enough to install Fedora on their laptop and then debug any problems that come up. Offer a site-wide license to all students for $50k, or a department for $10k, or something like that. That would probably give you a lot of name recognition in the future. You already offer site licenses for corporations, right?
So when will RedHat come up w/ some decent licensing schemes for those environments?
Small Business Market? (Score:4, Insightful)
Question: Why has Red Hat never articulated a strategy appropriate for the small business market?
Example: My small business has 8 workstations and 2 servers; here's what's important to me:
I'm willing to pay roughly $200/year for standard support services for these machines plus per-incident costs if they arise. I have been running Red Hat 7.3 with 2 Red Hat Network subscriptions and manually propagating updates to the other machines (which is annoying but tolerable since N is small).
I have been a paying customer, and I'm basically amenable to any sort of metered service system where payment is for services used. However, now I am being jettisoned as a Red Hat customer: Fedora has no support, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is too expensive. Red Hat has all the resources already in place to support my needs, yet is unwilling to do so.
Why is Red Hat unable to support this type of revenue stream which seems perfect for linux?Will Red Hat QA contribute in any way to Fedora? (Score:3, Interesting)
To what extent is Red Hat part of the "Fedora community" for QA purpose? If Red Hat QA finds bugs in the Fedora Core from which RHEL draws, will Red Hat contribute bug reports and/or patches back to Fedora, so that the community as a whole will benefit from that work? Since Red Hat is naturally interested in maintaining some sort of differentiation to give people incentive to purchase RHEL, what criteria will govern when Red Hat would or would not contribute bug reports and/or patches to Fedora?
How can I convince customers? (Score:3, Interesting)
what distribution do you recommend? (Score:3, Interesting)
Regards
Migration (Score:5, Interesting)
So what should "something else" be? Your remark about Windows is legendary by now, but Microsoft is not an option since I depend on the gnu environment and a lot of linux-based software.
Why should I choose Fedora? Debian certainly looks like the best choice, offering much longer maintainance than the 4-6 month release cycle and 2-3 months of bug fixes the Fedora claims. And Debian is well established and has a strong user base. Even Suse and Mandrake look like better choices than Fedora's extreemly short maintainance cycle. Each of these distributions considers me (even if I download free ISOs) as their "customer", whereas Red Hat's attitude appears to be that I'm a "hobbist" or "enthusiast" if I use Fedora.
So please answer with your best "sales pitch" for Fedora. This is your chance to sell it to me and thousands of other long-time Red Hat Linux users. Or if you (and Red Hat) really don't care if I switch/migrate to Debian instead of Fedora, please be honest and just say so.
How will your choice impeed adopting of Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Before, it looked as though Linux was poised to make a major push onto corperate desktops within the next two years. Now without any firm support, many companies I have spoken with are ruling out Linux all together and going to other *iux vendors such as *BSD, Apple, and even Sun. With the sudden EOL for RH products, how are company's to trust RH's commitment to their products and services?
Explain the strategy? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing the makes your "Enterprise" sustainable is the support of commercial software vendors like Oracle, IBM, etc.
What happens when Oracle decides that it's easier to provide their OWN distro for running Oracle?
It seems to me like RedHat is turning its back on the community and throwing itself to the wolves.
Is Red Hat pulling out of the educational market? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Mr. Szulik,
I am the IT manager of a large academic department at a California university. I have installed Red Hat linux as the distribution of choice since 1995. I trusted that Red Hat would rapidly make patches available and found Red Hat's default GUI layout to be intuitive when training others. However, I am now in a quandry. I don't want to switch distributions; I'm happy with what I have. However, as the campus negotiated pricing for RHEL, several critical questions went unanswered. Since I am limited to one question per post, I will ask the big one.Why does the only level of support available for 4-CPU systems cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per year? Operationally, there is no difference between my 1, 2, and 4 CPU boxes. I get OS patches from Red Hat and support from the Open Source Community. However, the lowest level of support for my 4-CPU box would cost about as much as the whole campus's software support contact with Sun. Why is this a good deal and how can I possibly justify it at the political layer?
Thank you.
Might you be willing to reverse your direction? (Score:4, Interesting)
RHEL Work Station Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people here don't seem to have noticed that Red Hat still have a desktop product (RHEL WS 3 [redhat.com]) and if they did would find the pricing intimidating. Sure $179 of x86 isn't much, but it's a lot more than $0! Moreover $792 for AMD64 is out of the reach of non-corporate purchasers. (If my next home box in a year or so is an AMD64 will I be forced to use a different distro for the first time ever?)
So onto the question:
Could there be room for a level between Fedora (free, good, etc.) and the RHEL WS 3 pricing: ie. the RHEL WS 3 product, but with updates only via 3rd-party yum mirrors or some such?
Common Criteria evaluation (Score:3, Interesting)
SUSE and IBM got Linux EAL 2+ evaluated, and are currently working on receiving a higher level. However, when this evaluation will be undertaken is currently unknown.
Is RedHat currently planning to have their Enterprise Linux undergo common criteria evaluation, and if not, please explain your motivation.
Cost / EOL issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe that the popularity of Red Hat with business users early on was the promise of a workstation/server that was much cheaper than Windows, combined with decent support not available for the other Linuxes and BSDs. Now, I see [redhat.com] that the 'basic edition' of Enterprise Linux Workstation is $179 and for Enterprise Server is $349. All that for a distro without even web-based support, or a printed manual? While I still believe that RH is a superior OS distro to Windows, I think the price increases and limited support are hampering adoption by businesses, and some that embraced RH earlier might be feeling a bit betrayed. Do you care to comment on this?
What about Advanced Server? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. I am (among other things) the SysAdmin for a small ISP. We know that Linux is our best choice for server systems. It's fast, secure, cost effictive and reliable. When making our choice for the next distribution to use on our servers will I be able to obtain a copy of RedHat Enterprise Linux to see if it has features we would like to impliment like I can with other Linux distros? I'm specifically interested in what makes RHEL "reliable, secure, high-performance" (quoted from http://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/rhl/) and Fedora or Debian not those things.
Fedora vs. Mandrake: a merger? (Score:3, Interesting)
Compared to Red Hat, MandrakeSoft has very small financial capabilities, very low press coverage, but is still growing and attracting a large user and contributor community. Additionally, they now have a full range of products, from the pure desktop product to the clustering solution. They generally have excellent new technologies (URPMI/RPMDrake/dynamic desktop...), excellent support policy (see http://www.mandrakesecure.net [mandrakesecure.net]) and again with very low ressources. Why? Maybe MandrakeSoft understood something about the Linux community, a way to listen to it carefully (maybe too much sometimes).
Why wouldn't Red Hat trust Mandrake and let them deal with that? Red Hat could certainly buy MandrakeSoft easily, and the "Mandrake" brandname could become the community Red Hat brandname, by merging with Fedora. The "Mandrake" brandname is already very well known and this would be better for Red Hat than trying to impose the new "Fedora" brandname (this could take years).
Mandrake has always been a kind of little brother of Red Hat. They know how to do things Red Hat don't know how to deal with or don't want to do - and now they are profitable with this model. It could turn into a great thing for Red Hat and would help to catch a new big part of Linux users, in particular newcomers, individuals and small corporates, from the Windows world. At the same time this would avoid to frustrate millions of Red Hat users that are now considering a switch to another Linux distribution.
So why wouldn't Red Hat trust Mandrake for the community side of Linux?
Why stab everyone else in the back? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mods: checked the reports on this for reasoning but didn't find anything; if I missed it please feel free to mod this to oblivion but I would still like to know.
Enterprise on Multiple Systems (Score:4, Interesting)
Even without the current change in your business plan, we had been seeing the benefit of the longer release cycle, etc of the Enterprise product. However our understanding is that we would now have to purchase a licence for *each* server we would like to install the Enterprise product on. Adding up these costs, it quickly becomes ridiculous and a non-option for us.
This strikes me as a strange approach. Why has RedHat not offered a more palatable migration path for companies like ours using your OSS? For instance, you could limit the tech support levels and charge a nominal fee for up2date on additional machines, but still keep this under single unit pricing. If there is not a good "middle ground", the jump in costs for us is too great to consider.
The future of desktop Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Losing grassroots support because no RH distro (Score:3, Interesting)
I was solely responsible for pushing and implementing the port of our company's product to Linux. I specifically chose Red Hat because of brand-name recognition, and because it was a distro I could play around with before I actually committed to porting our software to it.
Now that RH is going completely in the Advanced Server route, I no longer have the ability to play with the OS before I do my development. My company balked at the prices AS was being sold at, as well as our customers, and we are now re-evaluating our push into Linux, at least using Red Hat. The whole point was that Linux was supposed to be CHEAP. Once they start going up in price, why wouldn't I go with a more established vendor with a more mature product like Solaris X86?
And please don't say that Fedora is the same as Red Hat. It isn't. It will have a different look and feel, different marketing, and different demographics especially as time goes on. People will not pick up Fedora and say, "Oh this is really just Red Hat Advanced Server".
I know it's not something that pays, but having Red Hat's name out there as one of the premier distros with exceptional quality was one of the things that kept Red Hat's name in the spotlight.
It's the same reason why Microsoft is pushing for the education market... they want to have the kids already have experience with their products. If you stop the up-and-coming kids who are interested in computers not able to use your distro, you have already lost mindshare.
Getting rid of the publically accessible distro will relegate Red Hat to the same status and mindset of SCO (before the lawsuit crap), where it was a business version of UNIX but regular people didn't play around with it. It won't be the first thing people will think of when it comes to Linux.
Please reconsider this disasterous decision because I actually do like Red Hat a lot.
I've always wondered... (Score:4, Interesting)
question (Score:3, Interesting)
My feelings are the same as those of every Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer I've talked to. What will Red Hat do to retain the benefits that were caused by its market dominance when it has clearly indicated that it no longer wants to maintain such market dominance?
Consolidation in the industry (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently there are at least 5 really significant players in the linux industry: RH, Novell-SuSE, United Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. Gentoo fills an important niche, but will never likely play a broader role.
By terminating your retail products while simultaneously throwing your weight behind Fedora, you seem to want to create a two headed distribution - a fully free community based distribution that maps extremely closely with a fully supported commercial distribution. Essentially your trying to appeal to both the enterprise customer and the Debian user.
Do you expect that either SuSE or UL will try to align themselves closely with Debian in order to create the same synergy?
Do you expect that in a few years the landscape will have only two big players - RH+Fedora alliance and another commercial+community alliance?
Dear RedHat CEO: (Score:5, Interesting)
Sincerely,
William Dunn
IBM and RedHat (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that desktop RedHat has been replaced with Fedora, and the consequent loosening of control of the distribution by RedHat, has IBM indicated any change to their business relationship with RedHat?
IBM is now pushing to have more Linux desktop systems out there, and presumably either is or will be sending that message out through their field consultants. Now that you've dropped desktop RedHat, are you concerned that SuSE, or indeed any other Linux vendor, may step in and establish themselves as the dominant desktop Linux platform by riding on IBM's coattails, and that they may be able to leverage this strength to cut into your enterprise sales?
Small Business (Score:3)
Now I'm faced with your website offering no clue as to the future of "up2date" and my ability to run a stable configuration of Linux without having to either:
- Pay more for the software per year that the servers are worth for the "Enterprise" rebranding
- Become a Linux guru, maybe even a kernel hacker, just so that I know the patches are current.
- Take a big chunk of time and effort, use BasicSoftware.com as a base to build, or help build, a community supported LiveUpdate type system, which would eventually take the place of Up2Date (and RedHat?)
- Submit to the extortion, and suffer with closed source inferiorware from the monopolists.
What migration option do you have for your current customers who are willing to pay $50/year/machine?--Mike--
What does it really cost? (Score:3, Interesting)
While it's tempting to break out the incremental cost of adding one additional subscriber to the RedHat network, I am interested in knowing what the whole thing actually costs, in real dollars? Also, how big a team does it take?
Perhaps if we knew the real size and scope required to keep RedHat going, we'd feel the need to be more supportive, instead of feeling betrayed.
--Mike--
Leaving customers behind. (Score:3, Interesting)
Should a 20 year old, rapidly growing business that can project needing enterprise grade services in 2 or 3 years, and currently pays hundreds per year for RedHat services that are about to be discontinuted, and paid retail for RedHat since 5.x days, ever consider using RedHat again?
--- my editorial behind these questions
Believe it or not, these are quite serious questions to me. My first RH distro was pre 5.0 and I have always bought the box set just because it felt like the right thing to do, and paid for up2date service since it was offered a little over a year ago. I have been as loyal a customer as they could hope for, but I can't help but to feel betrayed with the "new policies". Either I will have to suck it up and pay much more for service I do not need, or change distros. It would be cheaper to just pay RedHat, but I had the same feeling everytime Microsoft releases a new OS, with a higher price. Its cheaper to just pay the much higher price, but it still leaves a very bad taste in your mouth.
When you feel that your loyalty has just been rewarded with a slap in the face, you have no choice but to consider changing loyalties. Go google it, and you will see I have always been pro-Redhat, almost fanatically...until now.
Where will your *server* software be field-tested? (Score:3, Insightful)
In those Bugzilla discussions I mentioned, I've seen a lot of highly-informed, to-the-point correspondence from people just like me -- we have no problems patching driver code, recompiling kernels, parsing debugger output &etc., and I'd hazard a guess that the issues we raise and the bugs we help troubleshoot in the field (the ones that make it past your inhouse QA folks) are part of the reason that RedHat has been so rock-solid. This translates directly to the stability of the server-class packages you sell to our cousins in the corporate trenches. The targetting of Fedora at bleeding-edge enthusiasts and hobbyist installations means that these bugs (remember, these are the ones that made it past the in-house RH team -- have a look at the tg3 driver issues in bug 69920 [redhat.com] for one example) likely won't be caught before they bite your paying server customers. Do you foresee a decrease in stability for RHEL as a result? If not, where do you envision getting your field/beta testing done for the server components of your OS? Isn't it possible that, while taken by itself the "free" version of RH was an operating loss, when viewed in context of overall product line it was actually part of the reason you started operating "in the black"?
Red Hat's Financial Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Mr. Szulik, I keep seeing Red Hat put out one unusable, confusing and ambiguous interface design after another. Anaconda is a textbook case of what you shouldn't do when designing a user interface for non-geeks.
A Red Hat employee a while back who went to my campus' LUG told me that the reason why Red Hat software had such bad usability was they didn't have the money to fund HCI folks running a usability dept. at Red Hat.
Yet when we look at the financial history of Red Hat, we find that the company spent over $700,000,000 buying out other companies like Cygnus (purchased for $650M).
Mr. Szulik, how would you answer the charge that your company destroyed its chances to gain real home desktop marketshare by not investing a small sum of money that would make your software more accessible to the people you were trying to target, as well as substantially lower the costs you company would have incurred supporting that market?
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Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Re:Emphasis on Enterprise-level Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
I knew this question would show up quick. Let me sum up how this appears to me...Mr. Szulik, I am a laoyal Linux advocate and longtime user of Red Hat Software. I have downloaded the OS that you put together with your high paid developers (using your expensive bandwidth) ever since RH6.2. I can not understand why you are selling out and abandoning us....we got you where you are today.
Okay, so that may not be quite fair. However, I am guessing that the desktop was a financial loss for Red Hat. It was one that they cleverly supported, but a loss none the less. The fact that they supported it made a larger Linux base etc....and they benefited intangibly, but a board of directors will not tolerate intangible bennies only for long. A corporation is a math machine work plus money = more money that equation MUST be satisfied. Red Hat is going a natural route. When Linux is entrenched in many small-mid size corps then the desktop will be opened up. For now it is GENEROUS of Red Hat to support Fedora.
Re:Emphasis on Enterprise-level Linux? (Score:2)
Dang -- you beat me to it.
Short, sweet, to the point...