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New CTO at Red Hat

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the changing-of-the-guard dept.

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.

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Cygnus purchase VERY smart move.. by Brad_Silva · · Score: 4
    At first when I'd heard that RedHat had purchased Cygnus, I boggled. Then it occured to me that not only had RedHat purchased a profitable company that had been around for (I believe) about ten years, this company makes money supporting open source products! Not only did RedHat get some good programmers, they got a management team that has years of experience making money at open source.

    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.

  2. Re:Redhat moving away from OpenSource? by JordanH · · Score: 4
    • Failed OSS model?

    While I can't agree with the suggestion that RedHat Linux will become a 'closed proprietary solution', I do wonder if Cygnus' history seems to indicated that the OSS model is not a business model that can be profitable.

    If this is not the case, why does Cygnus sell closed source products when their original charter was support of Open Source (more specifically, GPL'd) software?

    Cygnus tried the OSS business model before anyone, and seems to have backed away from it, at least to some extent. What does this say to others considering this model?

    Perhaps the OSS business model will always be one of leveraging other profitable business. An IBM can afford to support OSS insofar as it hurts competitors more than them and it supports hardware sales. Companies like Cygnus can do OSS to help market their support/consulting business as long as they hold back some of their most valuable gems for more standard commercial licensing.

    I know of one small business that uses the OSS product that they produce to generate consulting work for the author and a few associates. That's the purist OSS business model and it seems to work for them, but they appear to have very low overheads.


    -Jordan Henderson