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New CTO at Red Hat
kerskine writes "Seems that Red Hat has a new CTO . What happened to Mark Ewing? " There also an updated press release available as well, which gives significantly more information. It looks like Marc Ewing will be spending more time working with the Red Hat Center for Open Source now.Update: 01/12 05:04 by H :The new CTO they've named is Michael Tiemann, one of the Co-Founders of Cygnus. As you recall, Red Hat recently purchased Cygnus. The deal closed on Monday, which is probably why this announcement has finally been made official.
I agree. Not like, oh, say, Marc Ewing.
> Try getting laid some night instead of long hours at your computer. You'll have a lot more
> tolerance for Windows then.
WINDOWS 98 - "The Operating System that Gets You Laid"
NOW INCLUDES MICROSOFT ACTIVESEX 7.0!!!
Somehow I don't remember Microsoft ever printing such an advertisement...
Wow. What an exciting night installing FreeBSD. Try getting laid some night instead of long hours at your computer. You'll have a lot more tolerance for Windows then.
David Brown
browndav@gateway.net
open source (or freeware) has been around for quite some time (far over 10 years). only recently has it entered the mainstream (some might argue if it has already). the internet has also been on the rise - no comparison of it's state 10 years ago and now (aol-tm merger, anyone?). these two facts might indicate the market is ripe for businesses operating in the oss model - more willing to accept this approach without prejudice.
:-) )
do notice that the market is embracing companies which are losing - e.g. amazon - simply for being prominent on the new horizon).
0.02$ from yours truly - AC
(I really should create an account
I would guess Marc wanted to move on and devote a lot of his time to the center, and this was a good opportunity to arrange that. A while back he was very involved in the day to day operations of Red Hat Advanced Development Labs and intentionally made it decoupled from the Red Hat release cycle, but then he got sucked back in to core Red Hat stuff. This says to me that he wants to spend more time on hacking and spreading the gospel than on running the business and making the numbers work out.
I really doubt that they forced him to do anything that he didn't want to do. According to the S-1 filing he is the second largest shareholder with 15.1% of the stock. The only person owning more is Frank Batten who owns 25%.
For those of you unaware of who Red Hat Center for Open Source is (like me untill 5 min ago), here's the link:
http://www.redhat.com/community/rh_c enter.html
By the way, if you're new to Slashdot, here's how to do it:
http://www.redhat.com/community/rh_center.html
<A HREF="http://www.redhat.com/community/rh_center.ht ml">http://www.redhat.com/c ommunity/rh_center.html</A>
Got it?
Seems like Red Hat, now faced with their public status, must move away from the failed OSS model of software development and secure some strong proprietary roots to do something that every stockholder DEMANDS -- Make MONEY. Time's up guys... time to switch to Debian if you still have problems with running a closed proprietary distribution.
An Open Source based company can never go public and sell stock. Sure, the stock will go to OSS supporters initially and company employees, but eventually it ends up with the wall street fat cats like any other stock who turn around and start demanding the company do certain things to make money... "What?! You mean we're letting people download our distro for FREE?!?! The GNU license doesn't require us to make code available via ftp. Shut down those servers. And let's put a fre proprietary apps on our CDs too, like MetroX. That way it becomes illegal for people to make whole CD image copies of our discs. So yeah, the GNU stuff is still copyable, but we'll make it so much work to separate the free from the non-free that few, if any, will bother to do so. That'll FIX those OSS zealots."
At least SUSE recompiles everything in their distro, and Mandrake is making noises about tightened security. These are two areas in which RH is in immediate need of adult supervision.
RH is absolutely the worst distro, and the one most likely to drive beginners back to Win98.
What the heck is it? Do they have a web page?
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Complain? Damn it, how can I complain when I voluntarily build a company's product for them? Red Hat is Linux and Linux is Red Hat as far as the general public is concerned - and they're the ones who really matter. Mike is the CTO of Red Hat, so Mike says what goes and what doesn't. I like Mike.
Remember: Mike's Wealth is Linux' Health.
What more motivation do you need?!
Cool. Now there's someone we can rally around. The harder you work, the better Linux is, the more Mike's stock options are going to be worth.
I vow not to rest until Mike is a millionaire.
I don't care how hard I have to work, how little I see of the outside world, how little sleep I get - knowing that my hard work is making Mike a rich man makes it all worth it.
miskam evets
RedHat or can only distribute the application or source, they can't really dominate it unless you allow them to. In order to allow RedHat to dominate an application that has been GPL'd you as the 'owner' of the work would have to grant them a different license agreement.
As part of the GPL whoever distributes the binary has to distribute the source and there is no way for them to prevent anybody else from distributing the binaries or source. They also can't make an enhanced version unless they release the source and binaries equally unencumbered. Any GPL stuff that RedHat has is available from some variant of ftp.redhat.com for the effort of downloading.
Again you as the owner of the code in question can grant a waver to RedHat but you would have to explicitly do this. You could grant RedHat (or any other company) the rights to modify and release in a binary only format and restrict from redistribution OpenVerse Visual Chat+ or whatever. In this manner you could enable RedHat to dominate a package by allowing them to release a closed source fee base package that only works on RedHat linux and so on.
Who is the CEO of the "merged" company. Who now is the CTO?
And best of all, it is actually in their best interests to be perceived as the ones being bought out...
- Sam Ruby
Are you looking for a clause in the GPL that says, "If you make lots of money distributing this software, you have to make it easier for people to get my software than I've already done"?
That's not likely to happen. Conversely, you might argue that that is precisely what they company is doing. Besides that, if you use the GPL, the company is obligated by the license to make the source code available to their customers. That's your source code. They're also not allowed to restrict distribution of your software (under the GPL, other licenses vary). If they do, well, then you might consider legal action.
If that doesn't answer your question, perhaps you could rephrase it -- I'm confused.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
Ah, but. Young and Ewing, the idealistic founders are now both pushed aside to make way for more hard-headed commercial types. The character of Red Hat is plainly changing into something other than what it was. They were once thought of as being a force for good but who knows where they'll be in a year's time?
Now that the millennium is upon us, perhaps it would be timely to remind ourselves that the Antichrist is about due to turn up. Perhaps he isn't an individual at all, but a corporation! After all, corporations didn't exist in John the Revelator's day so if he had foreseen this he couldn't have understood it in his own terms. However...didn't he describe the Whore of Babylon as having several heads?
John also said that the Antichrist would be acclaimed as a saviour before his true evil nature was revealed. Hmmm. There's some kind of parallel here...
And Nostradamus warned us that we should recognise the Antichrist by his blue turban. We all know how he used to fudge the details though, eg "Hister" vs. "Hitler". Maybe it wasn't really a blue turban at all.
Maybe it was a Red Hat.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
But what happens when a company who distributes these applications we worked so hard on begins to dominate the market. What happens when their distro is no longer freely available to the masses via FTP, ISO images and restrictions on giving copies via cheapbytes.
When their distro is no longer freely available we repackage the freely distributable portions and forget them. They cease to dominate. The GPL doesn't guarantee that others may not charge for your product, but it does guarantee that those who buy it can give it away free, and that no restrictions can be placed on its redistribution by the distributor.
If RHAT creates some closed-source installer, or other nifty item, and stops making the source available to any-but-paying customers, that's their choice. We just do without the neat-o thing (or pay, your choice). But nothing stops you from generating an ISO image and putting it on your website.
(remember, you can't spell 'GNU' without 'GN' :)
Quit whining you loser! I found the posting interesting, maybe not the most interesting thing I've heard today, but nonetheless interesting.
/.
I mean some guy got hired at RH...
I'd agree with you if they were talking about some tech support guy was hired or something, but this guy was hired as Chief Technical Officer and was the co-founder of the company that RH just bought. It definately qualifies as interesting.
I'm sick of hearing people complain about the postings and and the authors here. Take your flame elsewhere.
Keep up the good work
-Al-
Yeah, I've been thinking Michael's a good choice for a CTO. I used to work for him a few years ago at Cygnus, and always respected his ability to understand the technology and its implications. Better than most any other manager I've seen.
"What Red Hat now does will have a major influence on the future of the Open Source movement in more ways than can be counted."
True enough. So far (IMHO) the influence seems to be positive. To wit:
- Promotion of Linux certifications. This is important because it allows a wider array of CS support businesses to develop, similar to how Microsoft (MSCE, etc) and Novell (CNE,CNA) used to allow individuals such as myself (Novell CNA) to run profitable small businesses backing the technology.
- Reinvesting code/coder support to the Linux OS community: RPMs, support of Gnome, etc.
- the assistance in opening the IPO to more than just the large investors, etc.
- Providing a smart face to the Linux movement. Bob Young has the ability to explain (i.e., market) Linux to the masses better than say, Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox.
- Corporate support: I do not thing that Corel, Caldera, or Suse would have as much market share as they do if RedHat had not led the way. Look at Slackware, Debian, and Stampede, and the various BSD's -- all of these are good distributions (I'm trying to avoid sparking a flame war here), but the for-profit, company backed distributions have far more market share. This translates to more eyeballs seeing and report problems / bugs / security holes to the rest of the community.
- Support (all though not 100% yet) for the Linux Standards Board (?)(LSB), which is (IIRC) is trying to achieve a cross-distribution threshhold so that if I release app "X" under my favorite distro "A", you'll be able to use it on your favorite distro "B".
"Since Red Hat's IPO was announced, of the two founders Bob Young gave up the CEO's seat to Matthew Szulik... and now Mark Ewing has been pushed out of the CTO's chair in favour of tech-head Michael Tiemann...'xuse me? I didn't see anything that says "push out". Having two hard working, hard headed, savvy businessmen who understand how to achieve corporate market penetration for RH (which again, helps Linux in general) is good for the company especially now that IBM is backing Linux, and Tiemann has already proven a friend to the community via all of the GNU tools originated under his leadership at Cygnus.
Probably true. However, even given Linus Torvalds' joke about "total world domination", RedHat is helping deliver it. Joking aside, however, RH Linux is still more about is "total world liberation", because every RH CD I've owned also includes the source code so that if I want to roll my own distro, I can go ahead and do so. I just can't lock up the code afterward.
"They are now motivated by profit. That is why the two tech-heads who founded the company have been sidelined."
I question your choice of words. Bob Young and Marc Ewing are still central to different elements of RH's success. If RH becomes too corporate, developers will abandon them, so Mark Ewing is critical to keeping the doors to the OS community open. So it seems to me that these two "tech-heads" have moved within the structure of the company to where they really want to playe.
For the company to be taken seriously by the big boys, "wiser" heads must be seen to prevail.
Not wiser necessarily. More experienced in addressing the issues that the "big boys" (aka large corporate IT departments) bring to the table. I know -- I've worked in the IT or Network Engineering department at four Fortune 1000 companies (not sure if they were in the top 100 or 500 at the time)
I on the other hand, naive fool that I am, entertain hopes that Red Hat will stay true to its roots....
Hear hear!!!
I will probably get flamed for this, but I hope RH actually gets into the patent thing in certain areas that do make sense, similar to how Mercedes Benz did with unibody construction, and several other examples I am aware of in other technology areas where I company patented the techniques, etc. so that no-one else could, then proceeded to essentially give away the rights to use the technnology "because some things are too important to keep inside" (At least, that's how I remember the quote from Mercedes -- forgive me if I quoted badly). I would hope that RH will look at using some of its resources to develop and patent -- then proceed to open the code to the community. That way no-one else can try to lock those techniques/technologies behind closed corporate doors.
Anyway, while I have attempted to provide some contrasts to the thoughts expressed in your post, I agree with the general concerns. Keep up the good work.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Bob Young was on Public Interest yesterday (that's an NPR talk radio show in Washington DC), and the whole time he went on about how Open Source was the only way to get anything done these days, and the RH business model was to sell support - he used IBM as an example, indicating that IBM pretty much sells all its iron at cost, and makes the bucks on support and implementation.
Here's the Real Audio link: http://www.wamu.org/ram/2000/p2000111.ram
His one-song Open Source repetoire from yesterday doesn't square with them taking the company proprietary.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Dude, you've taken me totally wrong here.
I certainly didn't suggest that there was anything wrong with Mike Tiemann or Mark Ewing. I'm sure that MT will bring all sorts of good stuff to Red Hat.
As I don't know how Mark Ewing feels about the move, I certainly wouldn't even hazard an explanation of how he feels. Who knows, maybe the Center was his brainchild. I certainly don't know.
Mergers and acquisions are certainly sensitive times for all employees involved. I recently worked for a company where once we were acquired, there was no merging of personnel. Redundant positions fell to the parent company employees without exception. Management told us that there would be room for all to keep us from quiting while they were busy writing our "your services are no longer required" letters. It's totally a judgement call for management.
Being a founder of a company is a little different than just being a peon though. You invest your life when you work for a startup and if the rest of your business partners take an action that puts you in a situation in which you're not happy, then you've got a lot more at stake than Joe Employee. Again, I don't know what Mark Ewing thinks about this so it's all speculative and my humble opinion.
I didn't suggest that this move would harm open source. I don't think that it will make a single bit more difference in Open Source than any other butterfly in a rainforest. Of course if this does bring about the end of life as we know it, I didn't say this.
I realize after re-reading my post that I might have sounded a bit lawsuit crazy but I owe that to being burned by working for a startup a few years ago that got big, fast and started discarding the people that built the company by "offering" them "promotions" and then acting surprised when the folks pointed out that they realized that it was neither an offer nor a promotion.
YMMV, I know mine does.
-chaosgrrl
When you can't find your jello don't come screaming at me to remove the weasle from your headgear.
My question is this..
We, as programmers, have put a lot of work into providing applications, drivers, kernels, extensiosn to existing apps, etc all for the good of all to share. I do as well. OpenVerse Visual Chat
But what happens when a company who distributes these applications we worked so hard on begins to dominate the market. What happens when their distro is no longer freely available to the masses via FTP, ISO images and restrictions on giving copies via cheapbytes.
The masses still get our products, the fruit of our hard earned labour but now, they cannot share it as easily as before (no ISO to download, a new RPM format is introduced that only extracts on new RPM $120 distro cds) etc. What if the required inclusion of the license information and gpl.tx were obscurely placed away somewhere on the system?
If this were to happen, would the GPL protect us? Would we be, as a group, be able to say HAY YOU BIG CORPORATION! we know you're not breaking any rules but you've made it nearly impossible for people to share our information which is included on your product (at little or no cost to you) which was not our intent.
I'm not looking to be paid for my efforts. I'm only looking for others to be able to enjoy my efforts, modify it to their needs and share it with everyone who wants it. These big corps have a responsibility to advance this concept using the money they ear off of our work. If the GPL does not encompass this, perhaps it's time to rework the GPL... IANAL - I really don't understand all the implications of the GPL.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Oh great, here we have another Windows lover acting like an idiot publicly. Why do these guys insist on barging into our web sites and running off their mouths like this. I for one would like to settle the issue through a deathmatch, but I doubt said individual even knows what I am talking about. So instead I will probably just let it go, once again pondering the validity of the first ammendment, and wondering why we as a civilized society got rid of public stoning.
Munky_v2
"Life is tough, it's even tougher running Windows."
Munky_v2
Jay
Remember:Linux was started as a free project and will continue on - at a profit if possible, but it will continue on.
kwsNI
A.) Capitalize
B.) If you have a complaint, state it. Saying I hate Microsoft doesn't work. Saying "I hate Microsoft because their products are large, buggy, overpiced, undersupported, poorly patched, and hard to use." I mean, come on. How could we take you seriously when you're post looks like a 2-year old wrote it?
kwsNI
to Mark Ewing and Michael Tiemann in their new positions.
Does anyone know what the Red Hat Center for Open Source is actually doing?
-- Never make a general statement.
Do you have any evidence that this is happening?
I've not see it from Redhat. Also note that Young, Ewing and the other initial founders still control a large percentage of the stock. And as long as they can make the performace numbers that they have set they can more or less do what they want.
In short your seeing things that are not there.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
The GNU C++ compiler. He is still active in development (or was recently), he implemented pre-compiled header file support for GNUPro, the Cygnus version of GCC.
Oh, come on. Mike Tiemann has done more for free software than Mark Ewing (that's not to say anything against Mark, who's done tons). And he was the person who first proved that free software/open source could work in business, by founding Cygnus.
Cygnus probably has more revenue than the old Red Hat. Do you think that all of the talented people from Cygnus should be driven away, by letting all of the old Red Hat people keep the top jobs?
It's amazingly ignorant to suggest that replacing Ewing with Tiemann will harm open source, or, to be even more ridiculous, that Ewing should talk to a lawyer.
Felt obliged to make a quick reply:
'xuse me? I didn't see anything that says "push out"...
...Bob Young and Marc Ewing are still central to different elements of RH's success.
Admittedly I'm being cynical. Perhaps you're right and they both went, gee that's great, now I can dump the boring business stuff and get back to playing with tech stuff. But I doubt it was as clean as that. Even if they went willingly I'd bet they had reservations, particularly about loss of control. I think the child has outgrown the parents rather too quickly for this to have been completely painless.
Not wiser necessarily...
I agree, that's why I put "wiser" in quotes. That's how the old farts (and the wannabee old farts) of Wall Street will see it even though we might take a more balanced view.
I hope RH actually gets into the patent thing in certain areas that do make sense...
A nice idea. In fact the issue of patents is the biggest remaining threat to the whole Open Source movement.
*IF* Red Hat - or some other sponsor and benefactor with a deep wallet - were to accumulate a portfolio of useful patents to be licensed freely to Open Source developers then we'd have a fighting chance of surviving the coming legal war.
Because there's no doubt at all in my mind that once the dinosaurs who've continued to fight the Open Source trend realise that their days are numbered, they will most certainly use their patent portfolios to ensure that no useful software can developed and distributed without paying royalties to *someone*.
If we don't find such a sponsor then our only hope is for a radical change in US (and global) patent laws. There's no sign of this happening as yet since most people don't even realise that there's a problem.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
More people have switched TO Linux FROM DOS/Windows than have ever switched TO DOS/Windows FROM anything! Hell, the number of people who have dumped Windows in favor of FreeBSD is staggering in comparison...
ps. I blew away my Windows drive last night and replaced it with FreeBSD.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This kind of thing happens all the time in the business world. As it happened on the tail end of the Cygnus deal I'm sure that while it will be touted as taking advantage of blah blah blah and maximizing yadda yadda yadda for the good of the company (and the benefit of shareholders.) What it really means is that they struck some sort of deal on the table doing the acquisition and they are just following through with it.
As to whether Marc Ewing is going to be happy with the situation can only be answered by him. If I were in the situation I'd probably be quite ticked off by it and would start looking for a better situation... as well as a lawyer to look over my contracts VERY carfully to look at for my interests.
I certainly wouldn't attribute to this the death of open source at Red Hat. While that certainly may be somewhere in the future, I really don't see this single action as being that significant in the grand scheme of things.
-chaosgrrl
When you can't find your jello don't come screaming at me to remove the weasle from your headgear.
For those of you unaware of who Red Hat Center for Open Source is (like me untill 5 min ago).
http://www.redhat.com/community/rh_center.html
It doesn't say allot, but it's something.
Red Hat acquired two very important things with Cygnus. The first was an established, profitable customer base. The second was the talent that had produced the first. I don't mean to say that Red Hat doesn't have talent because they do. But this was an effective way to hire some of the best. It is good to see that they are taking steps to keep them. I would have been concerned if I didn't see anything like this.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Apologies for the self-promo, but we published a fairly long interview with Michael Tiemann not too long ago. I think he's a good guy for the job.
Paul Boutin | writer for Slate, Wired, etc
Why all this corporate news on
Hey wait... I think I figured it out: Since Red Hat went public and gave shares to all the geeks, the
Well I didn't get any shares, I don't care.
If you don't like the fact that the GPL and BSD licenses don't prohibit a company from making money off of your work, then use a different license. Make up your license if you have to. But quick complaining.
This sig is false.
Red Hat, Inc. has announced the formation of a new non-profit organization, the Red Hat Center for Open Source (RHCOS), that will sponsor, support, promote and engage in a wide range of scientific and educational projects intended to advance the social principles of open source for the greater good of the general public. RHCOS will foster projects that advance the philosophy of open source, through which collaborative intellectual pursuits produce results to be freely shared and enhanced throughout society. Red Hat, Inc. co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Marc Ewing will devote considerable time and effort to the new organization as a Founding Director.
In addition to Ewing and Young, the Board of Directors for RHCOS includes well-known innovators and thought leaders. Board members include:
John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His personal research interests include digital culture, ubiquitous computing, user-centering design and organizational and individual learning. A major focus of Brown's research over the years has been in human learning and the management of radical innovation.
John Gilmore, entrepreneur and free software pioneer. The architect of the first Sun workstations, Gilmore is a co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a leading advocate for intellectual freedom.
Lawrence Lessig, Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional law and the law of cyberspace.
Sim B. Sitkin, PhD, Associate Professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Professor Sitkin's teaching interests include managerial effectiveness, organizational behavior, organization design, organizational control and the management of organizational change.
RHCOS will initially be funded with $8 million in a combination of cash and Red Hat common stock donated by Red Hat, Inc. and three founding investors of Red Hat: Young; Ewing; and Frank Batten, Chief Executive Officer of Landmark Communications. Details regarding grant criteria and the application process are currently being determined by the Board of Directors and will be released at a later date.
Or rather, I get annoyed at unjustified accusations.
It isn't happening. So, why do you think this piece of news has anything to do with going proprietary? It doesn't.
And in case you haven't noticed, Red Hat doesn't ship MetroX, and hasn't for quite a while. And even the versions of Red Hat Linux that came with MetroX still had XFree86 as a fallback for people who needed to make copies.
Red Hat isn't stupid. We DEPEND on those OSS zealots, so why would we want to "FIX" them (including ourselves)???
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I've dealt with Cygnus, they are a professional group of people and I've never felt that they've compromised OSS principles by their contributions to GCC.
This purchase, more than anything else, leads me to believe that RedHat just might make it in the long run.