Red Hat Invades Washington

Paul Coe Clark III writes: "I caught Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, in Washington yesterday and grilled him about the DMCA, the SSSCA, the Sklyarov case and the future of Linux."

Comments

Good Interview

[krmt]

I'm impressed. Very good interview. I thought the most interesting part was about the PC being dead, and the question as to whether or not Microsoft has killed the market. It really is a good question to ask, and I think they are partially responsible. People don't feel the need to buy new machines because the old one does everything they think they want. But that idea ignores the fact that competition is all but ignored. Thank God Apple is doing such great things right now, I think they are the ones who will have higher growth than the rest of the industry simply because they are offering really compelling reasons to upgrade.

I think the other factor is that the machine itself doesn't seem to be a limiting factor anymore, it's the connection to the internet. Most people can't take advantage of their fast processors, because everything these days is focused on the pipes to the network. I've got to give McNealy at least partial credit for the whole "the network is the computer" deal, it's become very true. People seem to just use their machines as emailers, browsers, and muedia downloaders/players. True, all the other stuff like word processing is there too, but the fact that communication has become the real killer app of the industry shows where improvements need to be made.

I think he's right to focus on the devices that need embedded Linux, since those markets will continue to grow through phones, PDA's, and whatever niche devices people will come up with for specific industries. However, to say that the PC is dead is a little shortsighted. It's just stalled and waiting for the bandwidth to catch up.

Speaking of which, I think the big killer app for linux, if someone can come up with one, will be a new, or at least cheap and easy, way of communicating. Apache, PHP, and SAMBA are all focused on this, and they are the apps we always point to as big successes. I mean, the whole movement is successful because of the ability for us to communicate and cooperate to make an OS! Shouldn't the apps really reflect that? Maybe it's that we're all geeks and not so good at communicating (just browse -1 to see that ;-) but I think that perhaps we need to push beyond what's out there in this space.

I don't know, this is all pointless rambling. I'm obviously no better, or else I'd have some actual idea in mind rather than half-baked theories. Still, I believe that the PC is now a tool for communication rather than productivity. The productivity is still there, but it's not the primary purpose any more.

Re:Good Interview

[clontzman]

It really is a good question to ask, and I think they are partially responsible. People don't feel the need to buy new machines because the old one does everything they think they want.

So Microsoft is responsible because people are satisfied with their computers? I don't think that's really what you were getting at.

As for the interview, where's the beef? It's fine to sit and grouse about how Microsoft has "killed" the PC market (whatevah), but promising set-top boxes and interactive hoo-hah isn't going to impress anyone these days. Bigger companies than Red Hat have Ahab-ed that whale, and he doesn't strike me as particularly visionary.

Re:Good Interview

[snilloc]

Granted that Microsoft has done a lot of bad (and some good) things to/for the PC industry. What they have not done, is kill it.

They may be in the process of killing it with their media convergence plan for the spawn of the Xbox, but nothing to date has done that.

What will slow (but not kill) the PC industry is exactly what has been said before... nobody wants to upgrade because their computers already to what they want them to. Anybody with a Pentium class machine can run Win9x reasonably well, email, Word, internet. If that's all you're doing, why the hell would you upgrade??

Microsoft, and in particular, Win9x, brought all of these apps to the masses. (And by that I do NOT mean that MS did all of these cool things themselves... more of a chronological and technological corelation.)

The PC hardware industry will eventually become like the Auto industry. The average person will buy a new one in X number of years depending on his budget and when the parts happen to crap out, but there will always be an assload of computers on the internet. Individual companies will die, but there will always be a few who provide new hardware when the old stuff isn't cutting it anymore. The differences between the 200x and the 200x+10 year models will not be huge in terms of basic functionality until significant AI and voice recognition improvements have been made. Microsoft's current OS monopoly will have little bearing on the future of the PC hardware industry (Xbox comments aside). Apple boxes on par with the original pentium will have equivalent functionality. If there were a hundred different major OSes out there, they would all basically do the same thing. (though some would crash less often than others...)

The future I have described may be more conducive to Linux as users will want updated software and not want to pay for it... as MS will eventually cut off support for products as they age...

Re:Good Interview

[canadian_right]

People are happy with their computers because they are more than fast enough to do word processing, spread-sheets, and email. Intel, not MS, has turned the PC into a commodity.

MS is desperately trying to force people to upgrade their OS's (subscriptions, dropping support for win9x, etc...) because for most business users there is no technical reason to upgrade. Remember, most MS customer are businesses, not home users. Only gamers need to upgrade their hardware more than once every three or four years, and even then, upgrading the video card will make an older machine good for another year or two. CAD, and some engineering and scientific applications are the only business apps I can think of off hand that benefit from something faster than a P800.

My old PII 350 runs everything I need for business, under win98, just fine. The only reason I am even considering upgrading is to play the newer games.

DCMA

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Bruce Lehman was being very disingenuous, going all the way back to the Constitution, when the issue was the DMCA. The DMCA criminalizes the discovery and ways of working around problems one might find in software, and the draft SSSCA criminalizes even talking about it.

What the DMCA does with the anti-circumvention machinery kind of ties your hands in getting access to information. The SSSCA goes a step further and says it's absolutely required to install anti-circumvention on copyrighted digital works.

The logical extreme is that it would be illegal to produce any digital media that couldn't be controlled. I think there are places in the world where governments would find that attractive. I don't think the U.S. should be one of them.

Re:Opportunity or opposition?

[spamkabuki]

You're right. Apple is really only competition for RH on the desktop. I just think it's interesting that the RH seems to be giving up on that market, when Apple seems to be making some real progress with UNIX on the desktop.

Yes, Apple isn't competition for the serious server market. Yes, money is to be made by getting people off HP or Solaris. But why should Red Hat be making that money rather than other companies? HP may cannibalize their own market by bundling Linux and services with their hardware. IBM is far more capitalized than RH's "top public software company in North Carolina". What does Red Hat really provide that is compelling enough to win in that market? I'm not sure I see what Red Hat will do that will let them win there.

They seem to be going in many directions at once. Maybe that will give them a chance to do everything well, or maybe not. Will companies that focus on one area do better? Despite some lackluster experiences with RH, I don't really want to run Red Hat down. They've done a lot for Linux. But, they can't deliver on the desktop. Will they be able to deliver top solutions/service on both embedded and server at the same time?

Re:In the end

[_johnnyc]

Good one:-)

Back in the 70's and 80's not many people had a home PC, but those that did knew something about what they were running. It seemed to do a lot of things then, and it does even more now.

But the PC has grown into an overblown Internet applicance, and it remains the biggest barrier to the Internet for most people. Getting on the Internet is enormously complicated when you think of how simple it should be. If it were only as simple as getting an appliance, plugging it in, entering a username and password, and you're on the 'Net - there would be many more using the Net.

At this point, the OS is irrelevant. Most people just can't get a handle on what an OS is, because they can't touch it or see it. IMHO, linux will be a success anywhere it doesn't get noticed. When people notice the OS, it's probably not a good thing.

Re:In the end

[Colz Grigor]

All OSes are evolving towards the same ultimate endpoint: An embedded control system for TVs.

Somehow, I am disappointed. I had thought that computers had more potential than that.

First off, this comment was moderated as "Funny". I don't think it's funny nearly as much as it's poignant and interesting.

And I'd like to make a counter-statement. I won't discredit Waffle Iron's opinion; it's a valid one that many people share. But my vision of the future of computing is different.

Nowadays, most of the family units with disposable income have a TV and entertainment center in their living room, family room, or den, and a TV in their bedroom. They also have a spare bedroom, office, or a nook in the same room as their TV that has a desk with a computer on/under it. Often, older children still living in the household will have their own TV in their room and a computer under their own desk. Most of the time, the home computer will be used primarily for entertainment, much as the TV is used.

That's a heck of a lot of devices devoted to entertainment in each household. In many of these rooms it would make sense to combine the units, but there are some primary issues that we, as consumers, can't decide on.

The question that needs to be answered is whether we would prefer to have the TV move to the computer, or the computer move to the TV. This is the same as asking whether we want to sit in a desk chair and watch our scheduled content and videos from three feet in front of a 17" screen at 1200x800 resolution or whether we want to sit back on our couch in order to type our e-mail on a 540 scan line CRT.

Time and technology changes all things. Over the next decade, most of these people will replace their TVs for a new one with 1080 or 1200 scan lines. That's adequate resolution for computing. And User Interfaces are much more accessable from the couch nowadays. But I can't ever imagine wanting to watch all of my entertainment from a desk chair three feet from a 17" screen.

In the end, there will be computers and TVs, separate, for purchase by consumers like Waffle Iron, because he represents a market that would buy such products. I represent the market that would buy a unified product, and I believe that my perspective will become more ubiquitous as time and technology advances, so eventually we will see all of our computing technology being built (modularly) into our TVs. I don't find this the least bit disappointing, I see it as an inevitable reality.

Re:In the end

[Com2Kid]

uh. . . .

First off:

TV is often times a MULTIPERSON activity. More then one person can watch TV at a time.

Hard to surf with 2 people at once on the web, after that it becomes almost impossible. Unless you have a GIGANTIC monitor and one heck of a multi-input setup going on with lots of browser windows open at once. Personaly I think that just buying another few computers would help out more though, hehe.

When one person uses the computer the MONOPOLIZE that compters use time.

People can democraticaly vote on what to watch on TV. More then one person can participate at a time. The very SOCIAL aspect of watching TV is different, and ANY sort of individualized or personalized medium is going to have this effect.

You think Mr. Smith is just going to walk up to the family TV set and start surfing for pr0n in the middle of saturday morning cartoons?

Or that the kids are going to peacefuly coexist surfing the site at the same time? For any decent length of time at least? (at least to whatever extent kids ever do peacefuly coexist. :) )

Hell why should I _WANT_ to combine the two devices?

Do you realize that it is EASIER for me to play DVDs on my COMPUTER then it is to play them on my dedicated DVD player? Hell on the computer I just pop in a DVD into the DVD-ROM drive and it plays!

On my TV I have to change over audio and visual inputs and then manualy on the DVD player select the type of audio compression that the DVD uses and some other junk. Bleh. it is a ROYAL pain in the ass that can take up to five minutes.

Then I have to switch it all back to continue to watch TV. Another five minutes. Doh.

Computer, when I am done watching a DVD I just close the program down (one mouse move one click) and eject the DVD. Tada, all done. Yah.

Convergence... of what?

[_Sprocket_]

I represent the market that would buy a unified product, and I believe that my perspective will become more ubiquitous as time and technology advances, so eventually we will see all of our computing technology being built (modularly) into our TVs.

You're on the right path: convergence. But I think you've arrived at the wrong destination. Computing technology won't merge with TVs... its the other way around.

Convergence has been an occasionally surfacing buzzword for years now. Its been attempted by shoe-horning a PC in an entertainment center. Its been tried with internet appliances / set-top boxes. Meanwhile the technically elite have been changing the face of entertainment media and attempting to shoehorn better hardware in to their desktops to match. In every case, the interface ultimately fails. And its obvious why - all tasks do not work well with all interfaces.

This is why I believe you've arrived at the wrong conclusion. A "TV" does not make a good computing interface.

The folks at Moxi have taken a step in the right direction with their Moxi Media Center product. It basically becomes a central hub for entertainment media / data. Everything else (TV, speakers, etc) become satalite devices feeding off a wireless link. It even becomes a central hub for your data connection. So how does this solve the "computing from the couch" interface problem?

Moxi has made the first step. TVs will stop being TVs and become remote monitors. Strip out everything else. Slap it on a flat screen - a big flat screen. And then also create smaller versions of the device - webpads. The more personal size for handling email, taking notes, web surfing, etc. A slightly larger (something simular to the new iMac perhapse?) version provides an interface that's comfortable for desktop computing / work. Keyboards, pointers (mice, trackballs, etc), game controllers, and other such peripherals could talk to all such devices to create the right interface for any environment from balancing a spreadsheet to console gaming.

In short, computing (a centralized media server) absorbs all other devices (desktop, console game, TV, stereo, etc). Convergence moves away from the TV. And your experience is defined by what modular components you use to communicate with that central media server.

Disappointed - a shallow, hurried interview...

[s390]

Not much meat on the bones here. It seemed the interviewer was lobbing softballs and accepting facile replies without followup or pressing any issues. Frankly, I was not at all impressed with either the interviewer or the RedHat CTO answers. He might be brighter than he sounded, but one could not tell it from these interview responses.

I mean, RedHat's not about the desktop, OK? Did this interviewer not know it going into this? Where were the deeper questions about RedHat's working with IBM, HP, Compaq-Alpha-et-al, even Sun in the server space? Where were the clustering, scaling, fault-tolerance, instrumentation (performance and capacity monitoring) questions? No question about RedHat's broken GCC 2.96 compiler and what they're doing to fix it in later releases? This was just a joke, a parody of a real interview. What a shame.