Slashdot Mirror
Ask Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik
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.
Question #1 - Mr. Szulik, I am a desktop user of Red Hat, and your recent emphasis on Enterprise-level Linux leads me to ask if you know where I can get the best price on a copy of Windows XP?
Where do you want to go tomorrow?
What kind of a business model is it to lure everyone into using the RedHat Desktop, and then drop support. Seems like the Microsoft model of forced upgrades.
huh?
What is your hat size?
I mean, really? I mean, Windows on the desktop?!?! that's almost as crazy as Windows on a server! I use Redhat on the desktop every day, and it's all I need.
You are not the customer.
Don't you think if more users are using an operating system they will be more implied to use that same operating system at the workplace or recommend it to others. In that case, why did you recommend windows for desktop users?
did you decide to stop producing the Red Hat 'standard' distro, when it was the leading desktop distro?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Dear Mr. Szulik, where do you see Linux on the desktop for end-users going now, since RedHat decided to focus (almost) entirely on Enterprise-level? I thought we were doing quite fine, don't you think this is a step back in becoming the number one desktop OS for end-users?
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
Mr. Szulik, I have often recommended Red Hat software to people just beginning to learn Linux. Why have you discontinued the Red Hat Linux Desktop line, and what Linux distribution should I recommend to people wanting to learn Linux? Please note, Mr. Szulik, I know very well your comments on how people should use Windows on the desktop, but I'm thinking of people who want to learn Linux.
Is the up2date service going to continue to work for us end users who still use RH9, or are we going to have to go Fedora treating our existing installations as defunct? I've spent quite a lot of hours configuring my systems, and I think you're going to make a lot of angry users if things change too drastically. I know a number of people who are already shunning the name RedHat in favor of the other flavors.
Speak for yourself.
Some people (not neccessarily me) don't consider Windows to be Linux's enemy. They are in fact targeting to different markets. However given the fact that you are now focusing on the enterprise level Linux environment, What other products do you feel is Linux/RedHat's enemy? Another way of saying it is, What products do you feel Linux/RedHat is competing against?
With United Linux on the way, don't you think it was badly timed to have everybody using RedHat Linux ponder about which distribution to go for next?
What's the difference between Darl McBride and a mallard with a cold?
You don't have to answer, I'll do it for you:
One off them is a sick duck.
Matthew - If you were looking for an opportunity to start a small business (size at peak $25 Million revenue, perhaps 250 employees) in the Linux world, where would you go?
-- $G
There has been lots of talk that Fedora is just a testing ground for the software that goes into RHEL. Leaving the packages that go into Fedora is a state of 'beta-test-limbo' and once the bugs are hammered out, only then will they be moved into RHEL. How true is this?
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
For the average person, RedHat _is_ Linux. Who do you believe will replace you as being the defacto Linux distribution for the average person?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Mr Szulik, you are no doubt aware that there's a gap in your product lineup -- you have a good range of enterprise products, and a hobbyist distro, but there's something missing in the middle. A solid, tested and supported desktop for home users and small businesses, which doesn't carry the price tag of RHEL WS.
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
IBM did this with OS/2. It is far cheaper to support an operating system where you are only dealing with sysadmins then the type of people you have to say, "is it plugged in?"
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.
Fight Spammers!
Your diversion to a business oriented model makes a lot of sense, although you dont need me to tell you that. However, RH has long placed a lot of emphasis on helping (and defending) the general Linux community. Will we still be able to depend on RH for their help with both linux development (possibly through Fedora, possibly not) and their commitment to Linux? Or is this a signal of departure to a more closed model?
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When you say that people aren't wearing enough red hats, do you mean that they do not own enough, or that they are simply not wearing the ones they own?
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Your company has been in black for a few quarters and generally has shown good growth tendencies for analysts to give your stock good ratings and Buy recommendations.
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?
would you be interested selling me a fedora core 2 media set, and a manual?
With the SCO lawsuit, FUD from different companies and investment firms, and the need for businesses to have reliable and cost-effective solutions, will RedHat stick with GNU/Linux as its core operating system, or is there any thought to building more than one kernel-based enterprise suite? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.?
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
My question: Why use the word "Enterprise" when the clearer and simpler "business" means the same thing?
...who would you rather have piloting the airplane you're riding in?
a.) Darl McBride
b.) a bonobo chimp
What the fuck are you thinking? .. You have for the most part abandoned the average user(yes i know fedora exists). These are the people who got RH in the corporate door. I have a few RH servers in my office. As soon as the version of RH they are running expires, they will most likely become Debian. I do not have the financial resources or desire to purchse RH-AS. Could I run Fedora... yes. Will I .. no. It just seems like a pretty crappy move on the part of the company that most other corporations see as the embodiment of Linux(even if that is wrong).
How much will RH really support Fedora project? Is it going to be similar to what Sun did with OpenOffice project?
rawbytes
Please differentiate for us the differences between Fedora Core and its periodic scheduled releases, Rawhide (which used to be a bleeding-edge, "unstable/testing" compilation), and the Fedora Legacy project. I've only heard of Legacy once in an online discussion, and there was a link back to another discussion. This knowledge would be invaluable to those of us who are willing to use a more recent compilation like Fedora, but are uncomfortable going completely without an established system for fishing through updated packages from hundreds of willing volunteers and setting up an install-compatible repository. The Legacy project especially interests me as a gesture toward the low-price entry point for small business servers that Red Hat is abandoning with the death of RHL9.
-j
as you may know, many hacker circles consider Red Hat products to be insecure. how do you plan on enhancing the security of Red Hat products?
Given that your company is backing out of the low-end "consumer" market for linux distributions, RedHat obviously feels that profit margins aren't strong enough there to justify continuing that business model. Why do you feel this is so? Services like up2date seemed to me to be a wonderful method of turning a profit. It seems to me that a linux distriution that offers something like that would be able to make plenty of profit. Could overhead be too high at RedHat to make this possible, particularly given RedHat's history of instability and insecurity compared to other linux distributions (notable Debian and Slackware, and to a lesser extent SuSE)? If that is the case, why do you feel that Enterprise Linux will turn a higher profit margin?
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
Although I am not a user of Redhat Linux I am a Linux user who got my first start on Redhat. When I think of your descision to focus on the enterprise I can't help but think that you have done the Linux Desktop user base a great disservice. If it had not been for Redhat selling copies of its operating system in stores I would not have tried Linux at all. Linus himself even stresses that the future of Linux is in the deskop. How do you think you have aided the Linux community by removing the most accessable competitor to Windows from store shelves?
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Hi there... Are there plans to work more closely with other Linux distributors for some kind of standardizing for the OS or even some kind of joint venture like United Linux ?
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Fedora as the continuance of Red Hat Linux, or as something completley different? Or something inbetween?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
What are your thoughts on the Novell purchase of SuSE and the threat that they will pose to your enterprise business?
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?
All's true that is mistrusted
Assuming the Redhat vs. SCO case is resolved in your favor before IBM vs. SCO makes it into court, how do you expect it to effect their case?
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
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 ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
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?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
It seems that RedHat Linux has one of the strongest brandings in the Linux world. While I understand that you want to drive sales of RedHat Enterprise Linux, I must ask why the RedHat name is not tagged to Fedora. RedHat Fedora would be a much more attractive product to many people, who would otherwise be looking at other Linux Distributions.
In my office, on the news of RedHat ending their desktop distibution, our CTO is pushing for us to migrate the Desktops back to Windows 2000, and look into putting Windows Server 2003 onto the fileservers. While we had moved away from MS to avoid their licensing, we've suddenly found ourselves much less able to avoid it.
Although I don't doubt that RedHat has done it's homework regarding dropping the Desktop Version, I'm worried about what will happen to many enterprises, such as our own, who had RedHat Enterprise on the Servers, and the Mass Distributed Red Hat 9 on the desktops. Certainly in such cases it will make my job of arguing to keep RedHat on the servers easier if we could "Maintain a homogeneous environment"
Colin Davis
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?
What do YOU use at home? Linux or Windows (or maybe even a Mac)?
One of the biggest issues for putting gnu/linux on the desktop is more support for hardware. I understand why Redhat is supporting Fedora and focusing more on industrial clients, but I am concerned about the long term implications. What will Redhat be doing to increase hardware compatibility and support? Without an official Redhat "civilian" distribution do you feel that you will have the ability to sway hardware manufacturers to support gnu/linux?
Considering that the software in your distributions are made to a great extent (atleast over 50% of it) due to the efforts of the community, and the name "Red Hat" has achieved its recognition, not only due to its quality but also due to the testing and good-mouthing of members of the community, don't you think it is unethical of you to lock out the quality Linux distribution from Red Hat from that community? The GNU movement recommends charging for service. You could provide the ISOs and package updates to mirrors who'll gladly host it for the community. Think about it. You block out people from using their own hard work, and make it available to only some exclusive money-based segment which is out of the reach of many, you will eventually lose the community's support and popularity.
Banu
I see that you feel that Linux is not ready for the desktop. In that light, what key events need to take place in your mind for Linux to be considered to be 'ready' for the desktop. Key business alliences (a la Novell/SuSE)? Key settlements in a certain IP lawsuit (SCO)? Other milestones? Please give insite into WHY you feel its not ready for prime time.
AND, if its NOT ready for the desktop, what will you run on YOUR desktop?
Do you see your recent announcements having an adverse effect on the number of candidates seeking to obtain RHCE since presumably it will focus on RHEL exclusively going forward?
Has Red Hat's shrinkwrapped consumer-level product stream ever made a proft? To your knowledge, has SUSE or anyone else over made a profit from consumer sales?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I am considering dropping our support contracts over this. The problem is that contrary to popular to his statements about the desktop not being ready, we run a ton of thin client desktops. The client machines run the non enterprise version of the os and use remote X to connect to a clustered advanced server. Their recent moves drops any possibility of support for the client machines. I am highly considering a move to either Suse and or Mandrake on both the clients and the server. I liken their move to not support the client version to Microsofts new licensing stupidity. RedHats clustering is nothing more than Kimberlite and I can download that.
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!
Got Code?
I've used several distributions (distribution families, really) over the past few years, and the biggest hassle in switching from one to another is not the data (CD-Rs worked for a while, and now external hard drives), not the baseline apps (most non-specialist distributions, including RH, come with a boatload of included apps), but rather package management.
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
What about RedHat policy with KDE? Do you plan to finally support it or you still want to remove credits from KDE applications and modify every release removing/hiding konqueror,kmail,etc..?
With Redhat giving up the threat of market share on the desktop, doesn't that give Micrsoft a free hand to focus its efforts on the server market? Just as years of development of Redhat Linux on the desktop seemed to develop into a pleasantly usable state.
Would you reccomend it to home users once it became more mature and stable, for example when Fedora Core 2 or 3 comes out in the future.
Who was the Einstein who chose to dispense with "Red Hat" for the Free/Consumer versions of the OS? Red Hat is one of the names many of us "grew up" with, along with Slackware, Debian, etc. Choosing the name Fedora seems like Red Hat took a left turn when everyone else wanted to go straight.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
With the current drive of the OSDL and most of the Open Source community towards pushing Linux to the desktop, why is Red Hat eschewing this drive? Don't you think that this paradigm shift needs all the major players (including RedHat) to commit to this drive in order for it to be successful?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Some of the loudest complaints about Linux revolve around package managment and installation. Granted this field has improved lately with things like Red Carpet and Synapse, but application installation is still the most cubersome process in linux. With new initiatives by the Linux community to make a bigger dent in the desktop community, does Red Hat have any plans for some type of installation manager, like the wise installer? Some applications like Ximian and Open Office do a pretty good job of making the installation user friendly, but wouldn't it be valuable to the not so techy users to have a common and easy way to install new software?
WURD!!
What do you think are the implications of the Novell purchase of SuSe (and Ximian, for that matter)?
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
Here's a not-very-hypothetical situation. My company just bought about decent number of RHAS licenses - well, not really, I suppose, but that's how everyone refers to it, and the salesmen seem to encourage this.
I'd like to install Linux on a 'scratch' machine for some minor development and testing, and I now have a problem.
1) I don't like to use RH9 with that on life-support.
2) I can't install RHAS because the 'license' costs more than the ancient box it'll be on, and if I put an 'unlicensed' copy on our suppport contract is invalidated.
3) If I put on some other Linux, it's not all that compatiable with the RHAS.
So what the heck am I supposed to do? Do you really think this is good for Redhat? And isn't problem #2 really skirting the edges of what's allowed under the GPL?
If I sell Foobar Linux for $1000 a copy, with a $900 rebate if you don't execise any GPL rights, I don't think that's ok with the GPL, but it seems equivalent to what's going on with the advanced server licenses.
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?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What are the top issues you feel that need to be sorted out in order for Linux to really compete with Mac OS X and Windows?
Will Red Hat make any CDs or DVDs availabel for Fedora at all? I keep getting excellent Downloads, but the damn burning process is giving me fits for Fedora. Severn worked fine - Fedora is being cranky for some reason. All MD5 sums check out - just burining it and making it bootable isn't working like it should. Will Red Hat burn any Fedora Core CD's or DVDs and make them available?
I like the idea, it just bites when Severn burned fine and Fedora won't.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Mr. Szulik,
How do you intend to recompense the many small, independent Linux solutions providers which you have now put in a terrible position?
These are the companies that for years have been informing their clients that Red Hat is the best; placing Red Hat Linux servers in their clients locations, providing installation and integration services, and then the follow-up technical support.
Now, their clients are hooked on Red Hat and are being forced to upgrade to a version whose technical support offerings/requirements effectively cut the Linux solutions providers off at the knees.
There are many other businesses who have that kind of ruthless reputation (SCO, Microsoft, etc). Does Red Hat plan on helping those who have helped them, or do they seek a similar reputation?
Cheers.
Which OS and desktop environments you, your colleagues and friends use every day?
thanks in advance for your honest and direct answer.
How does Red Hat pertain to that burning question about the meaning of life, the universe, Linux on the desktop, and every thing?
I recently applied for a system administrator position at your Raleigh headquarters - I was just wondering what my chances are.
Thanks! Erik Williamson.
No sig for you.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What is the best consumer Linux distribution?
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
Dear Mr. Szulik,
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?
I've noticed quite a few questions that have been answered and re-answered again and again on the Fedora mailing lists and the Fedora Project website. Please read the Fedora FAQ before asking Szulik a question thats been answered a thousand times already by people who actually know what the hell is going on with Fedora.
Ayup
I am the senior sysadmin for a large (> 200 nodes today, ~1200 in 3 years) academic compute cluster. We are currently evaluating new operating systems for the cluster, and we've looked at RedHat Advanced Server 3. I am curious about your plans for this market. It seems to be the best choice at the moment, but the current pricing structure makes it ludicrously expensive.
What I would like to see is a low-cost cluster version, that basically comes with a CD and access to the RPM updates folder, for $20/node. That would be a major sell around here.
See you at Supercomputing 2003...
Fedora is called Fedora so that Red Hat can keep iron-fisted control over its trademarks.
I saw a copy of Red Hat Professional Workstation at CompUSA this weekend. It's not listed in bugzilla, and the web page all but says, "Don't buy this." What is RHPW, and who should buy it?
I would like to thank you for taking the time in answering questions from the community. Not many CEOs would listen to the community this close or would even attempt to answer their own customer questions.
[alk]
However, would one actually need to be dissatisfied to create such a distro? Isn't imitation the highest form of flattery?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Why should I switch to Fedora, rather than Debian
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It seems that more companies are paying dividends these days. Will RHAT start paying a dividend?
Why the OpenSource community should contribute to what's effectively your open beta test ( Fedora ), a project that will never be stable, and then have to buy back from RedHat their own work ? Don't you think the users will simply shift to other distributions, especially given the ludicrous price you set for an operating system that is 99% based on free software ?
Did RedHat make this move in response to the increasing popularity of Linux, in the sense that more and more people who are less technically inclined are making greater demands on RedHat for support? In other words, have you created a demand but underestimated the burden of responsibility for it?
Will you be going after people who tries to sell Fedora CD's just like those folks who tried to sell Red Hat Linux CD's? Another words how protective will you be with Fedora trademark?
Oh, redhat isnt going to be available to me anymore cause ill have to paaaay!
What am i gonna do now? Go to hard to install distros like mandrake? Buahh bad redhat!
Quit whining please, help the fedora project be the best it can be or line up behind your favorite free distro. Free software communities are the only place in the world where users can participate in making the software go one way or the other by setting a quality standard by themselves. Dont waste the oportunity.
NO SIG
Is RHEL covered by the GPL or not? If so, is there any legal reason why someone could not re-distribute RHEL ISOs or binary updates: 1. For Free, 2. For a fee?
Our company runs many critical servers on Red Hat 7.x. We have known for some time that 7.x support would be ending after 2003. What was recent news to me is that there is no upgrade path to Enterprise Linux, it requires a fresh install! Rebuilding all our production linux servers in the next two months is not something I had anticipated doing. I would like to migrate our servers to Enterprise Linux as it does offer some new features that are very useful to us, such as the new 3.7GB per process memory cap. So given the enormous amount of work involved in getting to Enterprise Linux is there any way to have a more sane timetable for migration? Either by offering an upgrade utility from 7.x (the most stable server version that I would guess most people are running) or by extending the EOL of 7.x. Alternatively are there any 3rd party companies offering support for 7.x after 2003? What I am most interested in, is to continue getting the errata and I would be happy to pay money for this service.
What does Enterprise level mean? Does it just mean servers or do you intend on keeping Redhat on Workstations also?
The main reason why redhat was able to go use/buy RHEL was because of employees/sysadmin suggesting the use of your now dead "Red Hat Linux"? How would you attract other companies now? (esp. the windows based one).
Mr. Szulik, can I get your autograph? I wouldn't mind the autographs of the development team too. You guys really put Linux on the map.
How much was the payoff from Microsoft to destroy your brand name recognition?
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 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.
Like Red Hat, Sun and IBM have free versions of products they sell. However, unlike Red Hat's Fedora, Sun's OpenOffice and IBM's Eclipse have the following characteristics:
1) They have clear and substantial backing from the company
2) They clearly seek to be the best in their class and have a substantial user base on their own
Consequently, OpenOffice and Eclipse not only contribute to the development of StarOffice and WebSphere, they increase the prestige and market share of Sun and IBM as well. Why doesn't Red Hat position and support Fedora in the same way?
Was this move actually intended to force my university to upgrade its Linux servers to something more modern than RedHat 7.3? If so, THANKS!
Small businesses that do not fall under a fancy term as 'Enterprise' are dying to get out of the grip of yearly licenses and monthy security updates from microsoft.
One would think that millions of small business can generate just as much revenue as thousands of enterprises could.
Are your economists asking for this business model change or are you?
The year is 2003 and most of know if our box is turned on.
Mammas don't let your babies grow up to be system admins.
Do you think there's a chance you've made a strategic blunder at a critical time in the Linux adoption curve?
It seems to me that your thinking is that people will flock to buy your products because you're the Linux market leader. Whereas really you're the Linux market leader because people buy and/or use your products.
I've deployed several Redhat Enterprise Server systems, because I use RedHat at home. I was paying for RHN service for my home machines, because your assumption that all home users are unconcerned with stability and support is also incorrect.
I've ruled out paying Windows style prices for all my machines at home so now you're turning my money away for RHN and forcing me to jump to a less stable option or switch distrubtions.
Either way I won't be recommending RH enterprise server because I won't be using it or products it's directly derived from.
I've seen my thinking reflected on various newsgroups. How do you expect to make a profit when you're actively turning away the user base that supports sales of the Enterprise product line?
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.
Perhaps you could do this every 4 core releases? Say, Fedora Core 4 would serve as RH10, Fedora Core 8 RHL 10.1, and so on.
This would allow you to still use Fedora as a "preview" of what RHEL offers while not dedicating too many resources away from your main goal.
(see the [outdated] mozilla.org roadmap if you want an idea of what i'm talking about: http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
(Editors: this is all one big question, with just a lot of explanatory stuff. Feel free to condense it as needed :) )
What do you say to the bitter ex-RedHat desktop users now left in limbo by your decision to go with RHEL only? Fedora's first release is, IMHO, a bust and lacks what RedHat brought to the table...stability. Be frank, I think it is OK to say "Hey, your segment of the market wasn't generating enough profit" or something of the like. Also, take Fedora out of the picture...in RedHat's desktop marketing research, who did you see as the best player out there in the linux desktop? Be willing to give a name and don't dodge the question as I feel many are interested in your answer.
You never saw a fish on the wall with its mouth shut.
I can understand wanting to move freeloaders over to Fedora from RHL. You recently froze existing RHN member's machine entitlement levels at their highest level. This was done without warning and is immediately and very inconvenient for current RHL users on RHN. Why not give us a grace period so that we could continue to change entitlement levels until you EOL'd RHL? Then we'd all be on Fedora and you wouldn't have pissed us off twice.
Mr. Szulik,
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?
when will RedHat have a more reasonable licensing scheme? Your licensing is excellent for corporate enterprise workstations, and I realize that you are moving away from home users, but what about clusters and universities?
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?
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I respect your knowledge of the industry and the change in demand and all of the "business" aspects of selling RedHat. I appreciate your software. All of this aside, though, telling computer users they basically SHOULD be using windows? Everyone has their reasons for choosing the operating system they use. Not everyone uses a computer for e-mail, web browsing, and games. For those of us who DO like RedHat and DO think it is at a sufficient level for the desktop, could you at least ask us what we want or need before telling us?
Dear Mr Szulik, I have seen different companies interested in using GNU/Linux and Open Source Software in a wide range of devices, like mobile phones, wireless APs, TVs, PDAs, TabletPCs, ... How do you see the future of GNU/Linux in the embedded market?
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?SuSE
I work at a startup with a very good IT staff (which has, thus far, been quite capable of supporting ourselves without vendor contracts) but a very low IT budget. We purchase RHES for our customer-deployed servers, and -- hitherto -- have used RH9 for our workstations.
With the RHL line ended, and RHWS outside of our price range (which really doesn't permit for *any* per-system fees on developers' stations), where are we expected to go? Fedora's poor QA (even more than its short lifespan) makes it of questionable value to us. Does Red Hat consider businesses of this type a customer worth keeping?
Note that we decided on RHAS/ES on deployment servers as opposed to SLES for the purpose of standardizing on a single vendor; should we determine to switch to SuSE for our workstation OS, the argument we initially used in deciding to purchase RHES would cease to hold.
One advantage to you for making RHL such a worthy brand is that many FOSS developers develope their software on RHL. In many cases, such s/w works best (or earliest) on RHL and you get most of that development for free. Will you consider making no-cost fully supported RH Enterprise Linux licenses available to the free and open source developers that write software that you distribute? If not, many developers will migrate to other distros and let Fedora fend for itself.
Are there any plans to release a extremly reduced price version of RHEL without support? To me that seems to make the most sense instead of going with fedora. People who do not have money to spend even $100 total on 5 server licenses could install a cheap or free version of RHEL and then when they are to the point of needing support or business requires support, they can scarf up the money. It would be an easy sale since the customer would already have the free or cheap version installed... no need to upgrade to some special commercial version.
That is the way open source was meant to be and allowing a company to make money.
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?
The value that RHEL offers me as a system administrator in an enterprise environment is a quality operating system with a support life-cycle that is in-line with industry standards. My reaction, and that of the overwhelming majority of my colleagues with whom I have discussed this issue, to your RHEL offerings is that the prices are disproportionate to that value. That is, there does not seem to be a reasonably priced option for customers who simply want access to releases from and errata from Red Hat, but who either do not require technical support or, for whatever reason, choose to procure technical support contracts from a third-party.
So, my question is: how apparent to Red Hat is this reaction from (potential) enterprise customers, and what if any plans are there to expand your offerings to win the business of such customers?
The questions asked in this interview are listed as having been asked already, and must be removed. At that point, they haven't been asked, so they may be asked. Then, of course, they will have been asked already, and must be removed...
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Customers of mine have been hesitant to try Linux. Many still see it as bleeding edge technology, and have developed a 'wait and see' attitude. With the free release of RedHat 9, I've been able to incorporate LAMP systems for small projects, at an incredible price. The stability, reliability, and security of those systems has helped to prove the overall impression of Linux, and in some cases lead to Enterprise Licensing for larger systems. With Fedora being primarily a testing release, without the stability we've come to expect from RedHat, how can I convince customers RedHat is a valid choice?
I would rate as one of your best assets the old Cygnus organization which is providing excellent support on the GNU gcc/g++ compiler. My company was a Cygnus client for years and has also gotten great support from the Redhat team in this area.
Enterprise is a word that always sounds big to me. How much support can you give to a smaller company? What kind of price levels/support levels (approximate) is Redhat now offering?
While I'm sure Darl McPrisonBride would gladly talk about ongoing litigation -- for which we're all very thankful; IBM and SCO lawyers sends their regards -- I think that maybe Szulik will not.
Might want to have backup questions if many RedHat vs SCO ones make the cut.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Mr Szulik, ofcorse you realize that MS's dominance leverged from the fact that their OS not only runs in offices, but also runs on 99.9% of home computers. Dont you think that the effort/money spent on the regular, non-profitable RH Linux would achieve almost the same result to the same staus of your OS. I know that RH Linux was a very big burden and resource eater, but on the long run, it would have paid off big time, and RedHat would have benfited the most being the #1 Linux distributor in the world, and if RH Linux was to be there, it would have remained the #1 distributor.
The lunatic is in my head
Dear Mr. Szulik, We have run Rehat on our office servers since the 4.2 days. We have recently been replacing our desktops (mostly OS/2 machines)with Redhat nine. Now that your company will no longer provide an inexpensive supported desktop solution for those of us who do not need the (expensive) enterprise solution, what other linux distribution would you recommend we use in lieu of Redhat 9?
Regards
You are pushing Red Hat Linux off my desktop (no, I'm not going to run Fedora - I don't do beta testing for anyone because I don't have the time). If I am forced to migrate to a new desktop, it's going to be Debian.
If I'm forced to go to Debian, I'm going to have to spend time and resources learning Debian for the desktop. When it comes time to specify server software, I'm going to specify what I know, which then will be Debian.
If you think that turning your back on our desktop needs is going to generate loyalty to Red Hat on servers, think again. Loyalty is a two way street. Disloyalty begets disloyalty. The choice, of course, is yours.
The phrase:
I've seen before.Last year.
When Steve Ballmer was asked about Software Assurance and Enterprise Licensing 6.0 and a number of corporate customers were, to say the least, unhappy with the new terms that Microsoft had come out with for its forthcoming products.
How are you explaining better than Steve?
How can quantifiably differentiate the extra value RHEL 3.0 adds to Linux while simultaneously being a good citizen contributing to free and open source software?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If I was looking to setup a low cost, low maintenance server, the old Red Hat distributions were a good fit as long as I could count on several year access to the Red Hat patch site. Because of this, it made sense for me to generally learn and practice my Linux skills using Red Hat. Now that I can't count on longterm Fedora patch support, and Enterprise is far from cheap, why would you expect me to care about knowing and learning the Fedora or Enterprise products?
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.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
As a Red Hat user since 4.0, I abandoned the distro after bluecurve was imposed. Considering the percieved abandonment of the end user (I'm writing this from suse 8.2 at work, which I also run at home), is it safe to say that if I don't like bluecurve, I should continue to use another distro?
Everything I've read says you get 1-year of up2date service with the purchase of AS, ES, or WS. However you also claim that each release will be supported for 5 years. How much are those other 4 years of up2date gonna cost me? Is there any way I could pay for just up2date on ES with no support whatsoever?
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?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
fedora legacy will support 7.3 and 9 for the forseeable future with up2date connected to a yum repository.
tasty electronic music vittles
If there was one thing about Microsoft (as a competitor in the marketplace) that you could change, what would it be?
Not really any question per se, except maybe the most obvious one: "Why?!?"
For me, I stopped using RedHat years ago, long before the 7.2 release.
I always found it buggy and unreliable, things just didnt work, were intermittent, or just a general pain. Sometimes the support for whatever hardware just wasn't there.
I've always thought of RedHat as the "Microsoft" of Linux distros. RedHat has seemed to be more concerned with corporate policies or whatever "marketing direction" BS, instead of what it's supposed to be about -- the users! (includes all classes, developers, etc)
I never even really liked the distro, I used Slackware since it came out way back when, until around slack 4-7, then it also got real ugly.
Lots of people say debian is great and harp on it, to me, debian is aweful! (no flames please), I hate it, it's horrible. slack beat it any time.
Does RedHat have any thoughts towards consideration of their users, some of which who have bought distributions from retail channels or otherwise, looking for long-term support ? I mean, you never expect your favorite distro (or most popular anyhow) to suddenly up and pull out like this. BTW Fedora is beyond aweful, nuff said.
these days I'm actually using Mandrake, at least it's one of the larger distros, and has real user support behind it, even non-paying club members can vote on package includes, now thats a bit of democracy you hardly see any more. It has also supported all my hardware, been dirt-simple to install and configure, and has never crashed (unless I forced one myself manually). Sure betas had their bugs, but that's what betas are for. so to me, Mandrake is and will be #1, I really hope they become the new defacto standard of choice for most common users and developers.
I guess Redhat just doesn't care about the users, its all about the bottom line. And just when the SCO stuff is getting really insane, RedHat bails, great timing ya morons!
I've never really liked RedHat anyway. Our company uses it for all our servers; I use it but I'd rather have other distros. Maybe I can get them to look at something else now.
I appreciate the need to boost revenues, but the dropping of redhat network 'up2date' for all of the paying customers is really a power-play to force those customers to pay several times as much per year. This feels like a 'professional management team' kind of move -- the kind that kills a company but keep the name.
Given that every sysadmin I know is mad as hell, the only outcome for all but the most critical (e.g.: oracle/db2) systems running redhat is a migration to some other distribution -- which one do you think it will be?
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
I'm not asking for much. Since I've already switched to Fedora Core, I've noticed that up2date still/already works with Fedora. What struck me was that there was no sign-up process! The packages downloaded without a hitch. Will this service continue forever? If your plan is to discontinue up2date support for Fedora, why?! Why not just keep charging for a RHN-like service?
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?
I am a student at the North Carolina school of Science and Math (S&M for short, no joke.). I am guessing that you have heard of the school seeing that Redhat HQ isn't too far away. Also, from my understanding you have many alumni from S&M working for Redhat. I am curious as to what happened to Redhat's educational programs as a result of the split up with Fedora. I mean, the educational community probably needs more a desktop than a workstation to mess on, people who see a Linux machine in terminal mode often get scared and run in fear but in X/GUI mode they are a bit more willing to touch it and explore the system. What are your opinions on getting people to learn Linux? I think a desktop oriented OS is needed personally.
PS: Would it be possible for Redhat to provide some enterprise software for the UNIX (really it's Linux) lab here at S&M? It would help benefit that whole image of giving back to the community for Redhat and I'm sure you could also gain some future employees if you start training them now.
Where do I send the Bill to when I have to convert my 10 Redhat Servers to Suse?
Someone has to pay for the time and it certainly isn't going to be me.
Maybe you can get your big brother Bill to pay for the conversion.
suX0r
Do you still think Linux is not ready for desktop
even tho we have been using it for year in our company with very little issue and IBM and Dell are backing the desktop use.
thanks
Sassu
How is Red Hat going to deal with the multiple free distributions that are bound to start eating at your market/mindshare?
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.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I manage the server team for an organization that has been featured rather prominently in your promotional materials. I'll be the first to admit that when Red Hat started pushing their enterprise software and services, we saw very little incentive to switch from the free distribution. We've only used Red Hat AS where it's required by the application running on top of it. Is this a common sentiment, and if so, is the cancellation of your free distribution at all related to it?
What pisses me off is that I just spent money on the RHCT course/test and soon after began studying for my RHCE. The point being that I'd like to eventually have my users and my servers on the same OS. With the new Fedora BS, I have decided to change distributions. I had felt going with the market leader, I would have the best Linux had to offer. As soon as I convinced the pointy hairs that we need to make this migration, get the servers up on RH and some of the engineers up and running - RH lets us know - Don't count on us for desktop, use windows. I am sure you can imagine how much of an ass I look like now.
See ya around RH, I just got my debian WS up and I am migrating my servers next. I appreciate you doing this early in my migration process, it makes the switch that much easier.
ymmv
I actually teach courses in Red Hat Linux, and I always had trouble explaining to people why they would want to pay for Red Hat, when you could download it for free. (Even with issues like real vendor tech support, etc.
Now I am having an easier time saying 'Fedora is the free download, if you want the most stable version, licence Red Hat, and you will get stability and a much higher level of vendor support'.
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
thanks
Now that support for RedHat at home has been ended, what does this mean for Gnome? I tried the Gnome version 2.4 included With Fedora 1 and it STILL had that ugly file dialog.
All other major Linux distributions ship with KDE by default. Apart from a couple of niche commercial products such as Ximian and Java Desktop, Gnome dosen't have much future on the Linux desktop.
Will Redhat (through the Fedora project) continue to support gnome, or will it switch to the Industry Standard KDE.
What do you think about an unified Linux architecture ?
Imagine, for example, a fedora/debian distribution, easy to install (as redhat), easy to use (as redhat), easy to admin (as debian), with rpm/deb compatibility. it can be the ultimate desktop OS.
Do you think it can be true ?
Ploum.net.
Ask useful questions, don't complain 'nuff said.
Dear Mr. Szulik,
Have you tried Gentoo? It's a great distro.
Thanks,
destiney
Ex-RedHat user
With SCO screaming SUE-SUE-SUE and Microsoft hollering WERE BETTER CAUSE WE HAVE PATCHES FASTER (What a Laugh!), the timing of this couldn't have
been worse.
Did you consider the fact that your doing as much to chase Corporate America away from linux as much as Microsoft is? How do you explain your timing on this announcement.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
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.
Everyone whom I've heard express an opinion, from freeloaders through customers to industry critics, have said that your recent marketing machinations are poorly thought out. Would you be willing to rethink your business strategy and reverse your current direction?
A lot of people here don't seem to have noticed that Red Hat still have a desktop product (RHEL WS 3) 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?
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
In your recent statements over at zdnet you touted Windows as the Desktop OS best suited for the consumer.
Why the snub of OS X?
Why proactively advertise a product distributed by a monopoly who continues to wage war against you and the OSS community in general? Apple's OS X's Darwin is Open Source Software, as I'm sure you're well aware and is based on BSD/Mach. And over all a more user friendly OS can not be found. The price points between a Mac and PC is much closer now as well, look at todays iMac pricing and compare to similar systems by Dell and Gateway.
Moreover, Apple has given back new and improved code to the OSS community. Especially in terms of its enhancements to Konquerer, which it used as the engine for Safari.
So wouldn't it make more sense for you to have pointed consumers to Apple's OS X as the desktop of choice?
Thereby aiding Apple's current market growth and keeping OSS solutions on the home users desktop.
The way I read your statement was basically, "If you are a home user, Linux and OSS have no place for you, go back to Windows"... and personally, I was extremely miffed at such a seemingly harmfull message to the average user who would consider leaving Windows when you could have advocated your allies instead.
"Readiness for the desktop" has always been a contentious issue, but I think that's mostly because nobody has defined what "the desktop" is and what exactly qualifies as being "ready". For example, some have astutely pointed out that there is more than one desktop--the expert desktop, the corporate desktop, the embedded desktop, and the "grandma" desktop, to name a few.
What's particularly problematic, however, is that the goalposts for "desktop readiness" seem to keep moving. First it required a friendly UI and basic office/Internet apps, but now it seems to have moved into MS-Office file format compatibility, ability to run off-the-shelf Windows software, etc.
People at Red Hat have raised a ruckus lately by stating that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. First of all, I assume you mean the non-expert consumer desktop and the "grandma" desktop. But what, if I may ask, are the specific things missing to make it "ready"? Do you expect that the list of requirements to be "ready" will change much? Under what circumstances can the goalposts be legitimately moved?
First, I see your move with Fredora as problematic.
I understand that you want to open up its development and make it more cutting edge. Fine. The problem is that many people relied on this version being stable and having updates. Many people like myself, made a point of buying boxed versions or Redhat Network subcriptions to support the development.
The way you have left things, I see many people moving away from Redhat Linux. I see this as shooting yourself in the foot as the reason that many developers support Redhat and many companies use it is because it is widely used.
Because you are discontinuing the low end support, many people will leave, and people will no longer see it as a popular version of linux.
Developers will shift the support to another version of linux, and tech workers will recommend to companies to use a version they are more familiar with, like the one they use at home!
The Question: Will redhat network be given a Fedora channel? ie. priority access to ISO images an updates for subscription members with the understanding that no official support for fedora is provided. In others words, people are paying to support the development of Fedora and to gain priority access to Redhat's copy of the Fedora archives.
My current employer will not allow any Linux on the network unless it is evaluated under the common criteria. The minimum EAL is EAL 3+.
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.
There are many long-time users of RH linux, such as myself, who over the years have relied on your company for mission critical applications of the OS (in my case my research as well as the computational clusters I use). Suddenly RH pushes their enterprise products and drops free software COMPLETELY. I have tested Fedora Linux and I do not think it is mature enough to run on mission critical applications. Clearly there are two options:
a) Pay for the yearly (!) $180+ license or...
b) Stop using RH Linux.
In my case, this will mean turning my back to RH and what I have heard from others, they intend to do the same. The corporate customers, who follow suggestions from their system administrators and who pay for a license, will probably follow in these footsteps because RH is becoming more and more corporate. Don't you think you basically started the end of RH with this move?
On the other hand I do not understand why I ask you this question: I already know your answer; "we do not make money with RH Linux and so we drop it and focus on Enterprise RH Linux". The problem is that most do not need help from RH to manage their systems -- unless they hire a windows sysadmin, and so, as I wrote above, your days are counted.
Mr. Szulik, do you think that the major factor that led to the success of Red Hat in the enterprise is its popularity among Linux enthusiasts who have been using it at home for years and than brought it to their offices along with the experience they had in administering and using it? Isn't it the possibility that if home users switch to another distribution, it will enjoy the similar success in the enterprise a few years later, at the expense of Red Hat?
What's the best pie?
What do you use everyday ? - Emacs/Vim ? - Gnome/KDE ? - RedHat/Debian/Mandrake ? (oups.. sorry)
Ploum.net.
I run a small business. I purchased a copy of Windows 2000 server with 5 CALs for about $800 or so. I purchased two RHN subscriptions for $60, because they were, by far, the better value. Now, with the pricing structure you have set up, it looks as if I'll have to pay about $300/yr just to keep my small business server up2date, all the while Windows Update continues to be free. Are you at all concerned that you may be pricing yourself out of the small business market?
OS X is a far better desktop experience than Windows. Its what the Linux desktops should be striving for.
Mr Szulik,
what would you say to those users who have been running RedHat Linux with applications that require [and only work on] RedHat?
i got caught in the situation, where one of my servers RH7.3 with a paid RHN subscription is running Plesk Server Administrator, which require RH and doesn't support RHEL except in the latest release which would cost me over $600 USD to upgrade to.
now i have one of two options..
either migrate to RHEL, and upgrade Plesk, which would cost me a big amount of money, not to mention the hassle of rebuilding the entire server from scratch..
or stop using both plesk and redhat as plesk doesn't support any other distribution ( it depends on RH due to the filesystem paths and other factors such as the way RH handles the network subsystem )
you might say Fedora is an option.. but with a 3-4 months life time.. i don't think so!
Dear Mr. Szulik,
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 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?
All things being equal, Linux is more stable and secure than Windows. Microsoft has more ISV's and hardware vendors supporting them.
Given that dichotomy, what market forces and justification will make RHEL on the desktop a more viable choice than Windows or any other desktop OS?
There seems to be a mass exodus of academic/university Red Hat users migrating to Debian. With the shift in focus to the 'enterprise' market, are you at all concerned about losing the university user base?
I am so tired of seeing all of the shortsighted IT people bitching in these comments. They all come down to, "I was getting something really good for free or close to it. I based my company's infrastructure on it. Now it's going away. Waaah!" I personally look forward to reading about rounds of firings due to inane, shortsighted decisions such as these. Let's see... a tiny startup company providing software for free. Yeah! That's who I want to build my company's IT infrastruture around! Here's a little secret that my dad told me, and has been and will eb true for the forseeable future: You get what you pay for. So suck it up, and deal with it. You got a free ride for a few years, and now the ride is over, and you have to deal with the repercussions. Sweet Jesus. Is every IT guy out there this dim-witted?
For example... I have free wireless broadband that my town provides. It's free, and it usually works very well. I do a lot of work on it. BUT, it's FREE, so I don't trust it. I haev a backup that I switch to when it goes down, which does happen. And you know why it doesn't always work, and when it does I can't bitch? I'll give you one guess... IT'S FREE. If one of my managers did the same thing, and decided to run all of our Net connectivity over this connection without any kind of backup just to save a buck, that person would be fired so fucking fast it'd make his head spin.
Fedora-core is less of an option than RHL (8,9,10) for several reasons; it will have an even shorter life (~9 months), and it's feature over stability focus.
What do you say to companies and Sys Admins like me trying to define the future of our systems?
The vast majority of GUI-based configuration tools for Linux don't mesh well with hand-editing of text configuration files.... For example, while I would love to see Vim and Apache start handling config files in a way that supports collapsable sections, I have a feeling that we are at least 5 years away from any move of that magnitude.
Including issues such as effecitve configuration administration, if Linux will succeed in the long run (with or without Red Hat... no offense), what needs to happen within the next 5 years, and what role will Red Hat play in ensuring that those needs are met?
I'm a network engineer working for a statewide non-profit organization. We have RedHat linux servers all over the state doing many different things - routers, VPN tunnels, icecast servers, web servers, dns servers, etc. We have never needed RedHat support (google has all the answers). We used a single free RedHat Network account to check and obtain security updates via up2date - then distributed the RPMs to the other servers ourselves. Even the least expensive RedHat Enterprise is more expensive than Microsoft Servers charity licensing.
Our company is not interested in being a part of a beta test group for RedHat distros (ie. Fedora). Now I am forced to look at other distros, which I'm sure will be fine in the end. But the point is you are driving your customers away because RedHat has become profit hungry.
I guess here is my question: Did you even consider that non-profits and educational facilities actually used RedHat for their critical business services?
(again Fedora, "For developers and enthusiasts who want the latest technology" can't be part of your answer - non-profit orgs look for stable linux distros too)
Mr. Szulik, as a publicly traded company, you have an obligation to your stock holders to earn profits for the company. (At least, as a stock holder, I hope you do!) At the same time, Red Hat has played a strong role in developing open source software that won't play any direct role in realizing profits (though perhaps an indirect role). What issues and tradeoffs do you consider between your obligations to the bottom line of profits, and your obligations to the open source community? Do you find that the two are symbiotic? Or do they conflict?
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
A question from the "enterprise point of view"
The company I work for sells redhat servers to run our accounting software. Technically we should be selling the enterprise ES or AS versions, yet the yearly subscription is same price as the initial OS purchase. All we (and alot of others) require is the OS, and security updates. support we can handle in-house, "major upgrades" generally come when the server is replaced and the OS can be purchased again.
$100 or so per year for updates was fair... how do you justify a jump to $350 for the same thing?
"Nyquil - The stuffy, sneezy, why-the-hell-is-the-room-spinning medicine."
The timing of this switch to, "Enterprise Linux" comes at time when SCO is demanding that the Linux distribuitions License their code, Is that Redhat see that SCO could possibly win this battle, and to cover themselve, have moved to the Enterprise model, where people, and then "Licensed" for the so called SCO source that is in the Redhat and any other linux, distribution?
The timing just seems so suspicious to me.
There are certain times when you wish a company could be completely truthful about a subject. I have been a Linux user, both personal and corporate, for about 7 years now and I honestly just don't understand the driving force behind RedHat's recent decision to drop its general distribution product. I truly believe this has not been completely thought through. On a corporate level, we have about 15 Linux servers all running RH7.2 which are conveniently managed through RHN. We like the stability and are very happy with the services RedHat provides us with, particularly RHN. Two months ago I would have never even thought of using another Linux distribution. Personally, I have used the latest and greatest RedHat releases as a testing bed for new features that may warrant upgrades of our corporate servers. I apologize for not being able site the actual Slashdot user, but there was a statement I thought was terrific which I came across a couple nights ago which went something like "clients are what feed the servers." I really think RedHat is leaving behind a significant portion of its user base which they cannot accurately calculate; you could call it "derivative" installations. The issue for us is not whether we can afford RHEL, but whether we want to. I can tell you the answer is no! Do you honestly expect someone to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for what amounts to email based tech support? I hate to say it here, but at least I can MS on phone. I want to close with this final comment; thus far I have really liked RedHat and can honestly say I have had very few bad experiences with them over the last 7 years. Nevertheless, if RedHat fulfills it commitment to drop general distribution product support I will seek another Linux distribution and they will never get have my business again. There are no real specific questions here, but I know a lot people share my sentiment. I think RedHat should provide feedback on this issue and offer a reason for people like me to lot leave THEM behind.
Mr Szulik: What OS do you yourself use for your day to day work and why? And if it is some form of Redhat, what OS would you use if there was no such thing as Redhat? (i.e. Windows, or some other distro, or a BSD?)
Get your own free personal location tracker
It appears that RedHat has made the decision that its future is in RHEL. Desktop Redhat is all but abandoned - I don't want to use Fedora, which is not a stable product but rather a hobbyist / experimental toy. I need a desktop that WORKS.
Unfortunately, Redhat has been the leader in the Linux industry - which means many programs only work properly under Redhat.
My question is this: with the abandonment of the Linux desktop, are you not afraid the Microsoft will introduce a new "feature" into Internet Explorer that will make it very advantageous for companies to migrate to Windows on their server platforms. Let's face it: most web-using consumers are currently using Internet Explorer. If MS integrates a new feature into IE and ties it into Windows server functionality, and this feature is appealing enough (and, of course, copyrighted and patented) to become a de-facto standard, where does that leave Redhat? It seems to me that this is inevitable, unless the number of Linux/Mac systems (and other web browsers) surpass 15% market share. Is Redhat being shortsighted by abandoning the desktop?
You may think that Linux is not ready for the desktop. You are partially right; until I can get Mattel Barbie Playhouse or stuff like that to run on Linux, Linux will not enjoy significant home user penetration. However, Linux desktops ARE ready to be deployed in controlled, corporate environments, and lots of people surf from work, and buy stuff while doing so. Ultimately, Linux MUST gain a noticable presence on the desktop, or else Microsoft, with its de-facto monopoly on the browser, will find a way to exploit that monopoly (either by legalistic crap or introducing new "features" that require a genuine MS server). Have you thought about this?
Mr Szulik,
/dev/null? I ask because Nalin owns many bugs in Bugzilla, but few (if any) appear to ever get fixed.
Is nalin@redhat.com a real person or just a clever mail alias pointing to
I'm not entirely sure if you are aware how many ISP manageable webpanels are dependant on redhat, but this is THE major issue we're currently having. We're a small Dutch hosting company (5ish cabinets of servers) selling co-located servers and shared hosting, THE thing customers want, is a managable webinterface.., plesk, directadmin, HSphere.., these mostly rely on Redhat distro's, though some support the enterprise version of Redhat, it tends to rise a lot of problems on compatibility and rises nasty bugs, due the majority (this is THE key issue) of the community and developers NOT using it, and most likely not GOING to use it if there's a (semi) free alternative.. I have been asking around about support on Fedora.., and plain to say: they don't trust it.., it's not going to receive the commitment Redhat had.., and generally you WILL lose a huge customer base if these programmers step over to a new distro. The problem already occurred at Redhat 8, it was too buggy plain out of the box.., then came Redhat 9.., that was great.., but the lifetime span was too short with the new update planning for most programmers to step over. Maybe this isn't so much a question, rather a request for comment.., what will you do if Redhat becomes one of the background players ?, you got big because of the majority of the community using it.., but big companies CAN fall (Sun isn't doing all that well.., let's not even start about SCO), if your enterprise goal fails, would you jump back to the past success formula ? (which pretty much ended around Redhat 7.3), which I would fear be too late though..
Mr. Szulik
What do you see for the future of RedHat Linux (non-Enterprise) users. Will your company be actively involved in the development/support/fixing of issues that arrise with Fedora, or is Fedora in the hands of a group that is only accountable to itself in terms of development/support/fixing. (Will you be officially distancing yourself from Fedora in the future (2+ years).
you shouldn't ask(/waste) the question.
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.)
Sir,
Has RedHat been able to run a business using only RedHat Linux? What, if any, proprietary products has the company turned to to fill gaps in the open source offerings?
Has Red Hat's consumer product line ever been profitable? To your knowledge, has any Linux vendor ever had a profitable consumer product?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Matthew, is Red Hat doing anything to resolve the massive issues the EOL policy has created in hosting facilities running Red Hat? As an example, see this thread on the EV1Servers (formerly Rackshack) forum, paying particular attention to posts by EV1Servers staff (with handles like *-EV1). I understand completely that Red Hat has not gained directly from hosting companies like EV1Servers running Red Hat, however there must be quite a few servers in there paying for Red Hat Network access, and now they will be left high and dry. And that's just one facility. Is Red Hat going to provide an upgrade path for these machines, or just let them sit there and turn into hax0r magnets?
(Note: I have no affiliation with EV1, beyond being a reluctant customer. But that's another story...)
adam
Mr. Szulik
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.
I would like to consider myself a RedHat advocate. It was largely based on my recommendation that 50 RHN Entitlements for updating non-enterprise version of RedHat GNU/Linux. My boss has since been rubbed the wrong way when RHN failed to "work as advertized" on August 29th. The best explaintion that I have gotten from RedHat is that it is "the nature of SSL" that forced manual upgrades of up2date & up2date-gnome for each system. In October, RedHat charged a renew fee on the 50 RHN Entitlements for another year of service. So, now that my boss has gotten the bill, he is asking what type of return on investment he should expect from May 2004 to October 2004. To make a long story short, the question is, are we being charged a full year for only 7 months of updates? If non-enterprise contracts aren't fully honored as advertized (automated updates require manual updates after Aug 28th and a full year charge only provide 7 months of updates) then how does RedHat expect advocates of RedHat to successfully encourage the companies that have gotten burned to pay out even more for enterprise contracts?
Will RedHat Enterprise Linux be available for a free download? If not, then doesn't that mean all enterprise developers will have to pay for their target O.S.?
Don't you think most people running plan Redhat and doing their own suport will migrate away since there are no licensing structure for those who just wants the OS and the program updates?
Hi,
:)
I got several questions related with the new RedHat Enterprise edition:
1) How will be the desktop support on the WS edition?. Do you plan to drop support for video cards, audio, DVD. What about support for GNOME or KDE on the desktop (I develop applications on the desktop so for me this is an important question).
2) I know that RedHat will not offer any kind of support for Fedora, but if a security bug is found then how do you plan to address it on that distribution? Will the package be removed if the maintainer doesn't provide a patch or does RedHat plans to contribute with security fixes as well?
3) Does RedHat support a reseller option? I have a product that runs on RedHat as the main platform, and i would like to bundle it with the distro. The product needs to run on multiple boxes (a cluster) so licensing cost becomes an important issue here. There is a way to get a discount based on the volume of sold licenses?
4) What is all the fuzz about RedHat not supporting the desktop (better go to Windows!). Today i read an article saying than IBM, the OSDN and RedHat will support the desktop. I'm confused here
5) Will Fedora support upgrades between versions? (I installed Fedora and managed to upgrade my RedHat 9 version).
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
So, if we have questions for Jim Manzi, Ed Esber, Philippe Kahn, Ray Norda or Michael Copeland, can we ask them here? It seems you're in a hurry to join their club.
Yup. Golden eggs are yummy.
How do you think setbacks such as no Linux ports for games such as Counter-Strike or Star Wars Galaxies (winex support is broken) affect distribution of Linux on the desktop? Is there anybody from Red Hat working with top developers such as Sony or Vivendi or Valve to try and get Linux users mainstream games?
how would you react to the community creating a freely-distributale RHEL variant?
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.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I am planning to go out on my own to sell IT services with my focus primarily on RedHat software. I cut my teeth on Redhat and I want to offer a RedHat desktop as well as other server oriented services. What are my options if I want to continue to use the brand name RedHat, to sell customers on the idea of using RedHat on both the desktop and the server, that RedHat can sell me?
Dawn of the Dead
It's not "Interesting", it's a troll.
Mandrake is essentially what you're talking about.
Linus developed the Linux kernel to provide a free unix alternative to the masses. The FSF (GNU) people headed by R. Stallman are HUGE proponents of free software. These two people (and groups) are the people who brought Linux up as a child.
Redhat stood on the shoulders of giants and prettied-up the whole thing and offered commercial support for the product. Now they're cutting the cord with the open source community - throwing all of their crap into an O.S. project (Fedora) and putting all of their effort into the new RHEL.
Q: Don't you feel that you've just shot yourself in the foot? You're going against the community - and the community has made RH what it is today!
You should be ashamed of yourself and Stallman and Linus should never return any of your emails or calls.
A while back, Red Hat acquired the startup company that I was a part of, "Hell's Kitchen Systems". We made closed-source credit card processing software that ran on Linux (and other Unix flavors -- it was called "CCVS").
All the folks from our startup left Red Hat years ago, and nothing has been done with that closed-source CCVS source code for years.
Any chance I could get that source code back? I'd like to take a stab at removing the closed-source bits and releasing an open source credit card processing engine, but as long as Red Hat owns my old proprietary work, the intellectual property issues surrounding this are stopping me from making the attempt. So, could I get it back? Pretty please?
By removing RedHat's copyrights from the product, you will be using a copyright circumvention device, and RedHat will have you prosecuted under the DMCA. They don't want to have to go there, but if you do this they will.
Despite financial problems earlier this year, Mandrake Linux has gained big popularity with their latest Linux distributions, and it seems to go quicker now (see distro ranking at distrowatch). They also have been pionneers of "what Red Hat should have done earlier" (release of ISO images, Cooker community...) and are inventing new interesting business models that seem work now (Mandrake Club).
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) 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?
I would like to see this quesition asked.
Why Fedora Core? This will confuse alot of users who want to go to the new "Red Hat Linux". Why not just name it Fedora Linux so that new users actually understand what it is?
Why not package this product as an .iso?
I'd love to park a CD with Cygwin on it next to the Knoppix disc; when forced to use products from the Monopoly Source, these make life bearable.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I appreciate that corporate goals change, and after supporting Linux extremely well for many years now you have decided to focus on corporate customers and drop your support for the consumer market. What I don't understand is why you said what you did, that Windows was better for this market? Perhaps it is at the moment, but there are other distributions still trying to change this, and I feel that your statement has now given them a major competitive disadvantage against Microsoft; all Microsoft needs to do is to state to any customer (by which I mean, for example, a PC retailer who sells PCs to the public preloaded with Windows and is now considering Linux as well) that even Red Hat, who should know, don't think that Linux is appropriate for their computers, and the relevant Linux vendor suddenly now has to patch up the hole you just created. Exit a game by all means, but why shoot the remaining players?
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.
I've heard some people having problems with Fedora Core 1 on IRC and OSNews gives it a "Moderate dissapointment"
My question is if Fedora Core does not get enough community support and it turns out to be a disaster, will Red Hat reorganize it's community software efforts or become more active in the Fedora Project?
The problem, I think, is that the new Red Hat focus orphans people like me who have no need for several hundred dollars a year in support fees, but who also are not bleeding edge developers. I use Red Hat to support a small poetry web site, http://www.daypoems.net. Your new strategy appears to leave me without an upgrade path from Red Hat 8 (short of the hassle of reformatting my hard drive and reconstructing my system), and with the prospect of security updates running out early next year. How does Fedora do anything for a customer like me? Thanks, Tim
Sir, We have for the past 6 years, been using RedHat on our web servers with great sucess. One of the big benefits was the low cost install base using the free RedHat line.
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.
Dear Mr Szulik,
With the recent purchase of SUSE by Novell and Red Hat's focus on the Enterprise, it is clear that Linux stands to make even more money. I think most of us believe that this increased profit for Linux-based companies will only enhance the pool of excellent software that is already available. The governing license for all (or most) of this software is the GPL, and it comes with certain inherent values. One of those values is that code can and will be swapped within a public sphere of developers, for the purposes of review and reuse. What we, the open source developer community, want to know, is how have you guaranteed the integration of these ethics into your business plan? How will Red Hat, the company, ensure that it continues to participate meaningfully to this community?
Why post rage against HatRat??
You should read the articles that you complain about instead.
I'm a system administrator running numerous server systems for a national laboratory. We have observed over recent years that if we want to run open source software (e.g. developed at other laboratories, universities, by the open source community, etc.) then it has typically been developed and tested on Redhat Linux. This and the no cost nature of Redhat Linux until recently has made the choice of server OS an easy one.
Now with the licensing fees being charged by Redhat for your only effectively supported OS, your Enterprise line, I wonder where this "sweet spot" will shift or whether it will disappear altogether. Certainly most of the academic development will not be done on the Redhat Enterprise line. It's too early to say about development done in the open source community, but I would expect that to shift off of Redhat also. We can afford the license fees for now, but if the software development shifts we will have to also.
I realize Redhat was in a difficult spot financially. However, isn't there a danger that shifting and/or destroying that "sweet spot" will have an adverse effect on the Linux community and on Redhat?
When you rose to speak at the recent Linuxworld in San Francisco, I expected you to say something to the effect that "Times are tough and this is what we had to do to stay in business. We're sorry about the possible negative impact on the community." Instead you gave this rousing: Isn't open source wonderful?, We're all in this together, etc. presentation. That seemed a bit hypocrital to me. How did you justify such a presentation given the upcomming end of life for your consumer OS line?
What needs to be done to make Linux ready for home desktops in your opinion?
They are just about breaking even. They are too young & too unstable and have no sustained profits.
How the hell can they afford to pay a dividend?
How do you expect software vendors to start supporting linux by porting their software and/or drivers if you yank service? What kind of message is that sending to them? (It was mentioned in the release, drivers for digital cameras, etc..)
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Now, it's obvious you think you have reached the critical mass to make a new kind of business model sustainable. But don't you think the previous one was better, after all the critics you see popping here and there ? Are you still confident in your new business model ?
Mr. Szulik,
A report today mentioned that Red Hat has been pushing Linux on the desktop in Australia. Red Hat is also pushing Linux on the desktop in the UK in order to get UK government contracts from Microsoft.
However, your position is that Linux is not ready for the desktop in the US.
This contradiction is a source of much confusion in community. You have taken away the solution most widely used for SOHO and private uses, said that it was not ready for the desktop, then turned around and said that it IS ready for the desktop (unless you live in North America). So if Linux is ready for the desktop in the UK, and in Australia, why is it not ready to use in the US, and if that is the case, why is the definition for "ready for the desktop" different for the US?
I understand the business reasons why you would discontinue Red Hat Linux... namely because it doesn't pay. But don't you think you will lose a lot of grassroots support for Red Hat because regular people like me won't be able to "play before you buy"? You will only lose more and more mindshare in the up-and-coming Linux market as time goes on if Red Hat becomes a business-only OS.
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.
Is there any legal way for me to get a copy or a RedHat production quality without support?
I have no interest in dial up, e-mail or the web based support. I've had Linux, and RedHat in particular on my personal desktop for 5 years at home, and 3.5 at work. I've supported hundreds of Linux machines over the years. In all that time, access to updated security was all I ever needed. I'm willing to pay for it, I've always purchased copies of new RedHat distributions.
I'll happily pay a reasonable price for the completely unsupported desktops, with access to security updates. However, $170/year/workstation isn't a reasonsable price ($50/year/workstation, and better quantity pricing is getting closer to the mark).
I have no need of most of the support infrastructure you provide. All I really want is the QA. Once RedHat says it is good to go, I've learned that they are generally right, and if they aren't, there will be a fix for it quickly.
Do you have a solution for workstations and file/print servers, that isn't more expensive then buying new PC's every three years (for 3 * $170, I can get a replacement desktop from Dell, for 3 * $349, I can get low end server, and for 3 * $1499, I can get an highend server)?
Bleeding edge technology from Fedora isn't what I want to be placing on desktops and file servers. I surely don't want to deal with updating it 2-3 times a year if Fedora isn't going to support older versions of the OS, especially if security fixes are "upgrade to the newest version". For the same reason your company always recommended never to use RawHide on anything important.
I'm the proud owner of a RedHat 2.1 AS server, and will continue to pay for the support of my servers that require specialized support (Oracle DB/Reports servers), where I do use it. However, for print server, file server, and desktop use, there are no price/quality competitive options to just buying and using Windows, or migrating to a different distribution.
Kirby
Didn't they already recommend users move over to Fedora? Why is this question being asked over and over?
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Red Hat's product is mainly developed by people not employed by Red Hat, but open source community volunteers.
How do you think the recent community backlash will affect Red Hat's bottom line? that
Will customers be able to buy Enterprise for critical systems, but still install the *exact same* software (not Fedora) for free on unsupported systems?
By "exact same" I mean the core GNU/Linux OS and all config files and sysadmin tools (so it is administered exactly the same), but excluding any proprietary user applications.
If the answer isn't an unqualified yes, then which key components can't be freely copied?
Is Microsoft looking to purchase Redhat? Seems like a good plan. Have Redhat kill off the free product so that Microsoft doesn't have to.
Scenario: A customer is using RH7.x, 8, or 9 in a SOHO environment or as a trial project in a medium to large business. Prior to committing to an expensive enterprise product those customers would like to a) have some confidence that you won't change product plans and leave them in the lurches again, and b) might want some free/reduced cost trial period to try a RHEL in production use before commiting funds and person-power to it.
What is your customer migration plan and how do you convince customers that your plan has long term viability?
Why don't you let users choose filesystems, and leave it to Linus to screen out filesystems that aren't ready for users to be choosing from? Does market leveraging really pay off for you? Why do you think of Linux filesystems made by others as competing with you --- does that reflect a lack of understanding of free software ideals?
Why red? Why not blue or green? Was there a market study done that indicated this was the best color?
If Red Hat wants to court the enterprise, they certainly have started off on the wrong foot. We currently have dozens of servers on RH7.2 for the same reason that you state that Red Hat Enterprise will have a longer release cycle. In other words, upgrading is a long and costly process for us.
One way or the other, we must migrate our servers to something else. This is very costly, we can't just take our production servers down and load a new OS on them. We must order all new servers and install the new OS, test and convert each server. To give you an idea of how costly this is, each fully loaded rack server cost us 11K in hardware alone.
To cut off up2date at the end of the year, puts our company in a bind. We can not possibly upgrade our servers with less than 2 months notice. And don't tell us that you gave us more notice, because you did not. So, since many of our servers face the Internet, our systems will be vulnerable after Dec 31st if we need a patch for an exploit.
Therefor we are between a rock and a hard place. We need to convert to something, but we can't possible do it by the end of the year. Because of the bind you put us in, Red Hat has now gone from our first choice, to our last. How could you possibly think that an Enterprise could move off of Red Hat 7 or 8 by the end of the year?
Mad as hell
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 alternatives.
I think that what's going to happen is that they are going to go after "end use" support, making sure that the RPMs for RH-ES et al are current and secure. There will no longer be a free lunch (or beer) for the latest updates from Red Hat.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
How does Fedora impact Red Hat's business model and the development of Enterprise-level Red Hat Linux?
Do you see Fedora as a direct competitor or modeled similar to GNU/Debian, turning into a totally community driven distro? And if so, how can you justify splitting the community and making them decide between the two if this is your goal for Fedora? In effect, why use Fedora instead of Debian?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
> We'll forward 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Szulik tomorrow
But not 11! If we end up with 11 good questions the whole thing will have to be thrown right out the window.
In my opinion, it sounds to me like you just played everything into Microsoft's hands. With Microsoft so desparate for a magic bullet against the Open Source threat, perhaps they made an offer to RedHat execs to make them all rich in return for critically destabilizing the already unstable Linux market. The ultimate FUD. Taking RedHat out of the reach of the typical RedHat user, and pricing your enterprise product higher than Microsoft's.
I just don't get it. Why else would the most respected Linux company suddenly spit all over that's been feeding them and deny interest in the product that got them where they are today?
This is the kind of move I could see happening in a fully mature Linux market, but that market wasn't going to be here for another 5 to 10 years. Now with your premature move, you may have fatally injured the movement for large-scale adoption of Linux. The slow death could be beginning now, and it's your fault if so. Thanks for being so impatient and short-sited.
Note that this is all pure conjecture and conpiracy theorizing, but I just cannot come up with any other believable scenario. My single question is: Why did you do this and what kind of world are you expecting to create with this kind of move?
Redhat and the Fedora project cannot distribute certain useful packages such as mplayer and mp3 decoders because of patent limitations. However, these are available through a number of 3rd-party apt or yum repositories. The problem is that there is little coherence between 3rd-party repositories, and some are incompatible with others.
Does Redhat or the Fedora project plan on setting up guidelines for minimizing the chaos involved with using multiple 3rd-party repositories, like a listing of each repository along with a listing of which repositories are incompatible/compatible?
I'm a Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer, with several AS and a dozen ES subscriptions. We chose to purchase support to allay the fears of those in our organization concerned about using unsupported software. All of the factors that made us choose Red Hat for this are caused by the large installed base. (Familiarity within the organzation, community support, stability, approved by certain software vendors such as Sybase, and ability to run a very similar distribution on important servers, desktops, and home machines). The quality, accuracy, and response time of Redhat's support generally pales in comparison to the quality of web searches and "community" support. Clearly Redhat made a business decision to hire cheaper rather than more knowledgable support staff. As the installed base of Redhat decreases due to recent changes, I worry that the quality of support I am able to receive on my Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems will similarly decrease. I'm also concerned that I will no longer be able to run a similar distribution on both important servers and desktops / test servers / my machines at home. I'm now seriously investigating other Linux distributions due to these issues.
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?
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?
Finally a question not covered by the Fedora FAQ.
-- Jason
I would like to ask why have you not offered any sort of solution for the small scale business owner. Even as your least expensive RedHat solution is $350 per year, per computer, this adds almost 40% to the cost of a dedicated server which can be provided to a customer for about $100/month. In an industry where profit margins are razor thin, are you looking only to cater to companies which have lots of money or extremely high end hardware, in favor of the small guys?
Sincerely,
William Dunn
sig?
Up until now, Linux in general, including Redhat, was mostly "smuggled in" into businesses at first: it entered through the "back door", typically in the form of unauthorised installs done by programmers, IT workers, and engineers. Then, when management hears about "that Linux thing", someone responds "we already done it!", and Linux gets the official blessing (that's the good scenario, anyway).
Now the programmers etc won't be installing RedHat for their own use at work (it would cost them too much of their own money, and it looks like quite a few of them are pissed at RedHat). You will have to enter the buisiness through the front door. The first person you have to convince is now the suit, not the geek.
This raises some problems:
1) Is Linux established enough in the buisness that the managers will be interested on their own, without their geeks prodding them?
2) At the front door, you'll meet the guy from Microsoft and the guy from Sun and the guy from HP, all elbowing each other. Can you go toe to toe with them, without the inside support of the "fifth column" of geeks rooting for you?
3) While you are fighting the Sun guy and the Microsoft guy at the front door, the geeks inside are still installing Linux on their boxes, only now it won't be RedHat. Aren't you afraid that when the management finally says "let's do Linux" the geeks will agains answer "Done already" but will point to their Debian or Gentoo boxes? The same force which was proven to be so effective at getting Redhat and other Linuxes into business can now turn against you.
Mr. Szulik,
Considering when Red Hat announced that they would be moving away from the Red Hat Linux boxed product to focus on WS and ES solutions for commerical businesses, Red Hat also announced the creation of the Fedora Core project for those users still interested in the spirit of the old Red Hat Linux boxed product.
Are you sick and tired of people forgetting that in the Fedora Project still exists the Red Hat Linux spirit and core - and continue to ask what they are supposed to use since Red Hat Linux no longer exists?
Hell, I bet you're even wondering where all these people who said they've been purchasing the Red Hat Linux box products are getting their copies of Red Hat Linux! If there were really so many, I'd imagine Red Hat would have concentrated solely on their end-user boxed product.
Ayup
Dear Mr. Szulik,
Since it is impossible to please everyone all the time, how would you rank the following groups in terms of importance? When I say 'importance' I mean expending effort to understand the needs of and attempting satisify.
(a) Your customers
(b) Your shareholders
(c) Your employees
(d) Open source community
Thank you.
I manage the IT department of a roughly 100 person startup transitioning out of startup mode. The vast majority of our nearly 250 (many of these are old and slow, but paid for) compute servers and desktops run RedHat. We run a little behind (we have been on RH8 for about 9 months now). We do this because uptime, reliability and stability are key. So it would seem we might be one of your target markets.
But the pricing model is unacceptable. It's right up there with Microsoft. Now while I agree that RedHat Linux 8 is a better OS than anything MS has ever produced, that's still an awful lot of money. It gets even worse, because your salespeople can't seem to quantify for me what differentiates a server from a desktop. If I can get away with using WS on everything except the ones I consider enterprise servers, it will only cost me about $40,000 - $60,000, depending on what discount rate we end up getting. If I have to consider the compute servers as servers, then pricing moves into the area of the utterly absurd.
So, we need a stable platform. We don't need much hand-holding. We don't need (or want) a continuous stream of updates that have to be applied to every system. My group has the only people who would ever call for support, and between us, we know an awful lot. Any calls we make would almost certainly represent at the very least a real hole in your documentation, and quite likely a real problem with the software. I can see us calling with 2 or 3 oddball configuration questions a year if we had something like AS support. That's about it. That's not worth what we've been told the licensing would be.
We could buy one copy of WS and one copy of AS, read through the EULAs, and (I'm 99.99% sure) legally copy everything we need to the other systems. We could just buy a copy of WS and build everything else we need from source around the web. Both of those are less than ideal options. But they still sound better to me than $40K - $60K (nevermind the upper limit). How do they sound to RedHat?
We're not alone. There are lots of companies in this boat.
We're poised for growth.
Are you even interested in our business?
What kind of crack are the people at Red Hat smoking, and where can I get some?
Regards,
Pclminion
Hi,
I have 2 questions:
Question #1
Are you aware that RedHat is creating a big hole in the value Linux servers? I live in a 3rd world country, and paying the licence for a RHE ES server will cost me 3 months of the salary of a employee.
So, what I can do is buy a server software in the range of 60 to 100$
This price range, 60 to 100$, is a big segment of the market that RedHat will not be in.
So, you are leaving this segment to be filled by Mandrake or Suse.
Why is not RedHat in this segment anymore? And are you aware of this situation? (Of course you are, but can you explain your position about this price segment?)
Question #2
Will Fedora have security erratas like RH9?
I will only use Fedora if it has security erratas.
Thats it. And I have been a RH user since RH4.2.
Many thanks for your time.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Realise that the transition to Fedora means people developing software can now also be the maintainer of the official package distributed in Fedora. Think about that. The mplayer maintainer can pacakge mplayer to go in an official Fedora non-Free yum or apt repo now (because Fedora has native support for yum and apt out-of-box). Or the gaim folks can package the gaim RPM on the Fedora Core CD images. How is that anything but awesome. You won't have to run around looking for those special RedHat RPMs for package foo made by Joe Random Hacker. On top of that, you still get the anaconda installer and all the sweet config tools, still maintained on Red Hat's payroll. Red Hat is not abandoning the community, they are embracing the community.
To restate more concisely a theme that appears frequently here: In RedHat's past rise to prominence, how large a role in your success was played by individual employees, consultants, and maverick development groups using free RedHat distros as a basis for RedHat Linux evangelism? -- and assuming that this has been an important factor, how can RedHat make up for the loss of this no-barriers entry path? Has RedHat adopted a plan to get better margins from a declining market share?
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I don't know if Mr. Szulik would be able to sufficiently answer this question because of the sheer diversity of the business that Red Hat is in, but this is what he told us (employees and former employees of Red Hat). We [Red Hat employees] must eat [use] our own cookie [product - Red Hat Linux].
Most Red Hat employees choose to use Red Hat Linux as their primary solution because we wanted to promote our own product. While most of the Red Hat core development team can sufficiently do everything they could possibly want using Red Hat Linux and the vast amount of open source applications out there, the services side of Red Hat is a bit different. Keep in mind that services oriented employees always tried to show that Red Hat Linux can be a pluggable solution for any business where Windows is "required."
Despite popular belief and public misconception, Red Hat's sole purpose on the planet is no Linux. It's a company that wishes to become and remain profitable, and does so by attempting to keep its offerings diverse and flexible. They have all kinds of products and services that they offer to any potential customer, although the two biggest name products have been Red Hat Linux for the end-user (desktop product) and the enterprise (RHN).
Providing services to customers who may not use Red Hat Linux requires Red Hat engineers to be skilled on different platforms with different operating systems, to utilize tools and applications on different platforms with different operating systems.
So to run the whole business, products and services, Red Hat Linux isn't the only thing out there. Yes, you're going to find Windows licenses floating around at Red Hat, just like you'd find Apple licenses floating around at Microsoft.
Ayup
Your focus is now on the enterprise desktop.
My question has two parts: Do you view the enterprise as ultimately, the gateway into the home desktop, and, how much resistance do you anticipate from corporate decision makers who are used to the 'home computer' 'point and click' paradigm?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It's often noted that there's a great potential for the Open Source community model to spill over into social/politcal movements. We have seen many examples to support this but we have yet to see a solidified political/lobbying effort by the OS technology sector to battle legislature like the DMCA. How has Red Hat been received in DC and do you know of or envision any single source of effort for political representation on behalf community as a whole (ala Surfriders)?
Mr. Szulik,
You recently stated that Linux is not the right choice for a desktop OS right now. Not disagreeing with you, many people like myself choose Linux, specifically Red Hat offerings, by choice. I believe, personally, that Windows cannot be the answer for every question considered that Apple has intuitively created a UNIX based OS that is just as user-friendly. What, in your opinion, would it take to get Linux distributions as comfortable and easy to use compared with Microsoft solutions?
Ayup
One of the nice things about free-software is the fact that I don't have to worry about big brother pounding at the door. The RHEL Subscription agreement contains the following worrysome provision:
4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. Which gives you the right to come knocking on my door with 10 days notice, and if I've accidently messed up, to knock whenever you want to.
Further more, it commits me to keeping absolute track of installed systems, and matching that precisely (or making sure I have more licences) to installed systems. This means that my developers can't experiment with non-production machines or try things out at home on their weekends (they're a bit fanatical that way).
Personally, for me, and the organisations I run, this is a deal breaker. It means we're going to be moving (and all our current mission critical production systems are on the RHN).
Which brings me to my question: Are you going to say goodbye, or are you going to rethink this one clause? We were looking at moving to RHEL (once it had caught up), but not with clauses like that.
How come you are charging so much for the Enterprise Workstation? Especially considering you don't have to fund the thousands of programmers who actually create and update the operating system, and only have to pay for specialty tools peculiar to your release (and I know that is not chump change either... but $300.00, come on!). You now charge the same price as MS Windows XP and I believe it is per workstation. Are you trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux world? Yes this is a question and a flame, but I am not trolling.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Should Steve Ballmer recommend that everyone use Linux instead of Windows on their servers? Do you see how really dumb a statement you made now?
Got Code?
Did you take into account the number of people who are *not* using RedHat (free versions 7-9) for a workstation? My primary use of Redhat (again, the free versions) was to install it as a *reliable* server platform for a multitude of different tasks required by my clients (not including Enterprise Apps, which I also install, which require using Enterprise Linux). I require, at the least, mediocre stability!!! Not bleeding edge X11 drivers for my laptop!!! Not kernels that require security upgrades every 3 weeks!!!
Have you considered the effects this will have on your market share? Have you considered that this might cause people to think twice about leaving Microsoft? Your distros are too expensive! They provide no added value for my existing customers running Apache and Zope! You should have waited longer to spring this bag of tricks...
You had a good thing going, the train was rolling, people were converting their entire operations to linux because it was *low cost, *reliable, *stable, *not a security/update nightmare. They were *not* doing this using Enterprise Linux. They were doing it using *****FREE***** linux operating systems. Now, I am forced to change my distro of choice for all of my clients that are currently using Redhat. They will not buy RedHat Enterprise! I support them, and you would not be able to provide for their needs with your 'technical support' while at the same time charging them a minimum of $350/year (per server).
Are you not in the least bit worried by what will happen when everyone in this niche moves to Debian? Or Mandrake? You are alienating a major share of linux sysadmins who have been extremely loyal. I've even gone on to promote you to the enterprise, and am responsible for those sales as well.
We made you, you slapped us in the face. We will move on, hurt, disgruntled, and considering using BSD instead. Thanks a freakin lot, you big jerks. This post would not have been so long, if i didn't care so much.
~Jeremy
I've been doing this for 20 years. I installed a couple hundred Novell LANs from 1985 till 1995. I certified and became a CNE. As Novell grew, they lost sight of those of us who installed and took care of their customers. I moved on to Microsoft. From 1995 till 1999, I installed a couple hundred more NT networks. I certified, and became a MCSE. I grew to despise MS and their arrogance. They treated they vendors and customers with little respect. I moved on to Linux. I have installed around 20 RH servers. I have my customers buy $60 up2date subscriptions and boxed sets. Red Hat has now become so arrogant I think I will sell my stock and move my customers and allegiance to Debian.
My question is do you think you can grow the company without the support of the thousands of network engineers, sysadmins, technicians and enthusiasts who advise the customers?
However, a Google cache of the page shows the relationship of Professional Workstation to the rest of the RHEL line.
The Red Hat Professional Workstation isn't available online, or through Red Hat, but through a few selected retail channels. Buy.com has it for $82.57, which includes one year of up2date service. According to the various Red Hat lists, it's the same product as Red Hat Enterprise Workstation. Here's the RPM list.
It looks like this product was a last-minute addition.... I recall someone on the Red Hat list mentioning that he received RH WS CDs when he bought the product. Apparently, it's not crippled or relabeled.
Given my previous rants on Slashdot about the Red Hat shadiness, this looks like a good option.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
Corporations actually bough RHEL because they could use RH9 on their desktops and workstations for free. Now that RH is abandoning the desktop do you really think those companies will continue using it? My guess is that they'll move to something else like SuSe or Mandrake. It may not happen soon, but in the long run. I don't think they'll pay for RHEL WS for all their workstations, it doesn't make sense specially if you have many. Those companies would probably have bought licenses and the works for many of their desktops, but not all of them. The compatibility that RHEL and RHL provided was the key for their business and now that's over. Fedora will be buggy, being the "bleeding-edge" and buggy is not something corporations want. I'm pretty sure Fedora will never be as compatible to RHEL as RHL was even if it's a "stable" release. Specially having a borad community-based approach. What home-users want may not be what corporations are looking for...
I'm wondering how it is possible to one day say that you think people should be running windows as a desktop operating system one week, and a couple of weeks later be part of the Group pushing for linux on the desktip?
I'm wondering how you feel about the current state of the Linux SOHO market given your move (followed by Novell's move). I know you're focused on the Enterprise, but there are many of us who gladly forked over money for boxed sets and for services to run Unix-like OSes on our PCs. I bought 4 or 5 versions of Red Hat. 3 versions of Mandrake. 3 versions of SuSE. This week I switched to FreeBSD, thanks to your move and the threat of a similar move with SuSE. Do you understand (or care for that matter) that your move may actually endanger the uptake of Linux because those of us who get Linux into shops are going to stop using it at home because it's becoming cost prohibitive to run a stable Linux distro as a SOHO user?
Are we there yet?
What do you think will be Redhats main revenue stream(s) next year? In 5 years? In 10 years?
...Red Hat Linux on all my own systems at home and at work, a major corporate effort has emerged at my company to migrate our Oracle Apps installations from HP Superdome to Linux (Oracle is agressively "suggesting" this option).
Procurement has purchased AS2.1. I have purchased a supported SUSE distribution. I am encouraging SUSE over Red Hat for the following reasons:
What reasons would you offer for me NOT to make these recommendations?
p.s. Sorry for sounding like somebody from Gartner.
The most important question to me is the future role of the Fedora distribution. Does RedHat and the steering committee intend to continue community development of a Linux distro derived from and encouraged by RedHat for the forseeable future? What assistance and limitations are being provided or imposed by RedHat in this endeavor? Can we (the users) count on Fedora being with us for years to come? I'm looking to gauge the level of committment and stability in the Fedora project so that 2-4 years from now my systems are not orphaned again when my distro of choice ceases to exist. Respectfully, and with many thanks for your team's hard work, Denagoth
I've been using Redhat since around 6.9 and since I've tested and tried many of the prevalent distros. All which have come up short in the long run. Debian lags with features(current-ness), Mandrake sometimes doesn't even install, Gentoo more compilcated than FreeBSD, and a few others. I can't understand why the Fedora Core didn't even start where its "predecessor?" RH9 left off. There seems to be a large gap in usability, somewhat in compatability and stability. I work for a mid-sized university where RedHat has become over the last 3 years the base of our infrastructure, and now I'm left with the alternative of paying excessive amounts of money (almost at the MS level) for a product that was once the corner stone of the OpenSource movement. or moving to a less stable alternative. So now it seems that the distro with the most to offer is more or less abandoning the community that built and supported it.
Why has your company misled customers for so long?
Read on...
We were all sold here on the praises of how great your Redhat Linux product was going to be. How it was going to revolutionize the way we did business and bought our software. How it was the ultimate alterative to very expensive, proprietary solutions. And how it was so much more secure and carefully tested and patched and on how top-notch the support we would receive would be.
Then gradually...hmm...the prices started to rise. Version upgrades came more quickly. Quality support responses were becoming fewer and took days or even weeks longer than before.
Suddenly, we were told that certain (relatively new) versions of our Redhat Linux were no longer going to be supported at all! We must upgrade or die from lack of security patches.
Then finally, *no* version of this product that we had faith in would be supported. In fact, it would no longer be a product at all! Suddenly, its no good any more. Nobody wants to know from it. Your company's public website now begins to describe it as a " general purpose environment with no specific focus" and that it possesed " limited maturity/quality controls
Huh?!? Can you imagine trying to pitch a product to your customers that its own manufacturer describes as having "limited maturity/quality controls"?? I don't remember it being described this way to me way when Redhat was urging me to buy more subscriptions!
Ok, what can I do? You now seem to be giving me two alternatives. One is a "community" initaitive that you say " is for developers and early high-tech enthusiasts using Linux in non-critical computing environments". Hmm...non-critical, no keeping things running and keeping my job is pretty critical, so that ones out.
The other one seems to be a list of several variations of all the same stuff I used to have in Redhat Linux, only some of them are missing some parts. And these options seem to cost even more money. There doesn't seem to a long-term option to just download bugfixes/patches without paying you some kind of addtional fee. All of your overall changes seem to have a single goal: to make the same product more expensive, thereby generating more revenue.
As I said, why have you misled customers for so long?
Why do you hate us now?
-pyrrho
In corporate circles, Redhat and SuSe are really the two major contenders for software purchases with respect to linux.
By stopping the sale of a desktop version of RedHat linux don't you feel that you are going to end up losing sales to SuSe based on the fact that they still support and sell a desktop verion of linux along with their enterprise edition?
One can imagaine that most corporate IT decision makers would prefer a single support vendor for all of their linux systems.
I myself use Linux for everything that I can, but for some things, Ijust can't. Besides games, many applications cannot be run in Linux reasonably and have no reasonable alternatives. Graphics software like Combustion (very different than CinePaint) and 3ds max, audio software like SoundForge, these applications among many others can only be run in Windows and have no perfect Linux-compatible alternatives.
It seems like this is a chicken-and-the-egg problem; to justify Linux support, there must a sufficient number of users, and for a sufficient number of users there must software support. How do you think the Linux community should go about getting increased software support from developers?
Who shot JR?
What would you do for a Klondike bar?
Does Red Hat have any near-term strategies for gaining more of a foothold in the government sector? I don't just mean back-end software sales, but pushing for law & rule changes, at both the Federal and State levels, that would give RH and other MS alternatives a better shot at winning government sales.
I guess my question is, "How big is your administrative law staff?!"
This is exactly the question I would like to ask.
I'm interested in how you have come to the conclusion that Red Hat has excellent QA and support. Have you personally dealt with Red Hat support? If so, what was the nature of the problem? An RTFM problem where you only had to be pointed to the right doc / given a procedure? A defect in the distribution?
My company has been using Advanced Server 2.1 (with several paid-up copies) and over a period of approximately 6 months have only been blown off when requesting support. For a kernel issue (fixed in 2.4.10 and higher -- but AS2.1 is pegged at 2.4.9), "it didn't scale for Red Hat to support this", and for a buggy driver "You are downrevved, upgrade" -- on a product where the point is to have a 3 year lifecycle. We have never called with RTFM issues, as we have those capabilities in-house.
I agree, Red Hat support *sounds* good from the marketing materials, but when it comes time to deliver, they scramble for excuses not to provide it.
Matthew, how do you expect to build enough brand strength to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux into businesses without the grass roots-ish momentum from Red Hat desktop Linux?
mbbac
Hello,
Was the decision to no longer activly maintain the desktop edition of your distrobution based in anyway upon market trends that you have seen at Redhat regarding the penetration of GNU/Linux on the desktop?
We tend to hear a lot of hype in the Free/Open software world, and sometimes I worry that the current state of our little world is not as peachy as it is sometimes protrayed by the tabloids.
Does Redhat feel that GNU/Linux is doing well on the desktop at all?
[favorite blog] http://planet.gnome.org/
And what about your zelots.. thoose poor poor zelots.. are you just going to dump them with no way to upgrade their kernels without breaking whats left of their Red Hat boxes?
[the short of it]
How do you expect people and corporations to trust Red Hat with their money when your company has demonstrated that it will cut support out of the blue for products that are mission critical to them and not give them an adequate migration timeline?
[the long of it]
My company has been running our servers on various versions of Red Hat Linux for 4 years now. We just purchased a new server this year and finished properly configuring it about a month ago. Everything in my experience about Red Hat has been top notch, from the software to the up2date service. Last month, Red Hat was my number one Linux distro choice.
Just 2 weeks ago, I find out that support for our OSes will be discontinued in 2 very short months (we do not run RH9). This timeline is even shorter than it seems because of the holidays. I keep up with current tech news, reading Slashdot, Ars Technica, Google News, etc. daily. Your move caught me completely by surprise.
Now, after reading your reasons, I FULLY agree with your decision to cut the RHL line. A business, in the end, exists to make money. If you find that to make money and to make a compelling product you have to focus in the paid server arena, more power to you. I've been wondering when more corps would do this, and I think you were in the best position to make this change, mainly because of your great reputation and install base.
Your reputation, however, is now in the shitter because of the timeframe that you assigned to killing off support for the RH line. Two months is a blink of the eye to corporate IT people. We cannot change all of our systems over to different versions of Linux, some of which are mission critical and are running back on RH 6.x. And we cannot go without updates for months while we try to upgrade our systems to your new server OS structure. All of this could have been managed if you gave people at least a year more of support. That would have given them time to talk with Accounting and feed money into your very reasonable server licensing scheme.
Red Hat's rep was built on IT geeks like us using and loving Red Hat Linux. Your rep is one of the key things that separates you from Debian, SuSE, etc. Your rep is what has put your name head-to-head against Microsoft's name when generic news outlets talk about the Linux v. Windows war.
And you repaid your user base with a big "fuck you" by pulling support for all of their mission critical servers without giving them a chance to plan a proper upgrade strategy. Corporate support is something that Microsoft has down pat. They will pull their OSes off of purchase lists fairly quickly, but they support them for years after the fact.
Right now, I convince people not to install Red Hat's software on their servers. They cannot be sure that Red Hat will support them when they need it, nor will Red Hat give them an adequate migration plan if that software is not going to be supported any longer.
If you wanted to kill support for RHL, great just do it. Its your service for a popular ( but apperently unprofitable) product. But, Why on earth are you changing the name to fedora? If you wanted to more clearly designate the purpose for each of your products, why not alter the name to reflect that, while keeping the readhat moniker? Something along the lines of Redhat Develpmental Linux(RHDL) would serve your purpose nicely. From a marketing perspective, it would seem that you do not think that Fedora is worthy of the Redhat brand.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Dear Matthew,
From anecdotal knowledge and personal observation I reckon that Red Hat Linux is very popular in many Third World countries.
A huge dilemma is now created by the RH Enterprise Linux's dollar prices. Even the $179 WS version translates to about South African R1200. That is well within Windows XP Professional's cost-range since Microsoft adjusts their prices for local economies and exchange rates.
Fedora is no option for commercial use. Where should we turn?
In 3 years, when a customer decides they want enterprise support/reliability, how do you plan on helping them transition from a fedora distro that has been updated 5 times to an enterprise product that is backward compatible with todays product?
I used to be impressed by RH's shoving the edge in the enterprise, but I've had to recommend against continuing with RHAS at my company because of the falling behind in storage addressing. RH paraded RHAS 3 into our offices crowing that it could address 256 LUNs. We have already had to move our systems to SLES 8 because they will support 2048 LUNs. How am I supposed to take RHAS seriously for the enterprise when SLES 8 (and any other commercial Unix) have already licked a problem like this years ago?
flames > dev/null
... get up with money-grubbing fleas. Say what you like about the FSF and the FreeBSD Foundation, but you know they aren't going to hire a bunch of suits, grab up the code, add closed-source proprietary extensions and sell it--- turning their back on the community that built 98% of what they are selling. For-profit corporations are about money, money and only money. Trust their greedy asses at your own peril.
I have 4 payed for subscriptions to RedHat Network that don't expire until September or October of next year. Don't you think I should be entitled to a bit more compensation for the premature death of a serice I have payed for than "evaluation copies" of RedHat Enterprise Workstation? Oh... And don't say that the service "keeps working for 6 months after April" because if you're not updating the packages it's worthless.
:o)
On a brighter note: good luck with Fedora (looks pretty good to me) and all the enterprise products. RedHat are still the brightest star in the GNU/Linux portfolio of companies and give a lot back to the community. You really get it. And yes, I will be trying WS and ES in the coming months to see if they are worth paying for!
Thanks.
If Red Hat wanted to encourage a sense of ownership in Fedora and also see whether the open source community could build a better Red Hat than Red Hat, one which Red Hat could no doubt use in the future, why not base Fedora on Debian, thereby uniting two of the largest open source communities on the planet? Not onlyw would this make software installation in the Linux world a moot point, but wouldn't this also provide a great test case for open source development? Thanks
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
IBM has used RedHat's products at several of their sites - primarily US-based sites as far as I'm aware. IBM seems to focus primarily on using SuSE for their European-based customers.
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?
As an advocate and evangelist of RedHat from version 5.2 until 2 months ago, I believe it will harm RedHat that no ISOs of the new products, especially the high end enterprise products, are available for public download and distribution: no way to study/learn at home (except if one is rich), no way to bring in RedHat into the "back door" for evaluation or test beds, no way to evangelize colleagues with real running systems. If your business model is built on support, why restrict access to the base enterprise software (even if with no updates except via source rpm)? Your new competitors will do this (SuSE + IBM)
Why isn't Red Hat actively marketing their Professional Workstation Product?
I wish I could mod this up. I 100% agree. My only wish would be that it was Red Hat Professional without the Workstation part and included all RPMS. Additionally, it appears the key difference from RHEW other than price is that updates are only available for a year through RHN. If this is RHEW why can't they just put the RPMS they've already built into the RHN network channel as well? Oh well.
The 'Other Products' link at the bottom of their software page will lead to the Professional Workstation page.
Additionally, RHPW fills the obvious gaping hole in this matrix between free and ouch. The biggest problem being the difference in 'Update lifetime'. 5 years or 2-3 months. Doesn't really seem reasonable.
I guess my question would be: This whole thing seems like a PR screw up. Is any one in the Red Hat marketing department going to get the axe?
jasonLots of people feel there is a gap in the server market between RHEL-ES at $350/year/box and the $0 Fedora with it's 9 month lifetime. Filling this will be new distributions built from RHEL source code that pride themselves on being nothing but RHEL minus the logos. Such efforts would be easy for Redhat to derail, with oddball build environments, java dependent installers, dependency changes in security patches, etc. while still staying true to the GPL.
Are you worried about the knock-off distro's and would redhat ever change its policies to make them less attractive?
I think this was a last-ditch effort to fill the void. Good move on Red Hat's part.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
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--
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--
Mr. Suzik:
You and your company have been on the forefront of promoting and standardizing Linux for a number of years. You have done this while at the same time actually running a profitable company, so far be it from me to question your companies move away from desktop products.
However, there are a lot of people out there (myself included) who use Linux for all of out computing needs. I tried Linux (Red Hat in fact) as a Windows replacement for the first time a little more than a year ago. I've never gone back. While I can see that for some organizations, maybe in fact many organizations, such a switch would be difficult if not impossible at this point in time, for the life of me I can't imagine however why in a recent interview you suggested that most people should just stick with Windows for desktop use. I don't see how this statement serves either your interests or the interests of the larger Linux community. I have no plans to switch back to Windows, and having a single distribution to worry about saves a lot of work. Needless to say Red Hat won't be my first choice for either desktop or server use at this time. I do hope that as others continue to pioneer implementing Linux on the desktop that it will ultimately be in your companies best interest to re-join them.
I guess my question is: What possible benefit was it for you to recommend that people stick with Windows on the desktop? Who are your constituents for this point of view? And if you simply think that it is "bad business", why not let your competitors go down that road unobstructed?
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/comparison/
The advantage of ES over WS is that it includes server packages.
The advantage of ES over AS is that it is cheaper.
how's that?
Redhat has received a fair amount of bad press due to trivial things like your (paraphrased) "It's not ready for the desktop" comment. It appears the Linux community gets nervous whenever someone is seen as #1 in sales or marketshare, making people lash out at the slightest thing to keep the company from running away with too much power. My question is how can Redhat or any Linux vender retain a number one spot when they are held to a much higher standard then the competition when innovation can just be copied line by line?
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
The CDs are available from Cheapbytes, among others.
Did the fact that Debian recieved not one not two but three "Reader's Choice" awards have any influence on your company's decision to no longer directly support the standard distribution of RHL?
RHEL 2.1 was a stabilized version of RHL 7.1.
RHEL 3 is a stabilized version of RHL 9.
RHEL 4 will probably be a stabilized version of Fedora Core 3.
SuSE Linux is currently the distro of choice on IBM zSeries machines and their new relationship with Veritas for storage management seems to solidify the perception of them as the true enterprise-class Linux for the big iron. What is the Red Hat strategy for competing with SuSE on the high-end enterprise servers?
We've all read your recent recommendation that home users should run Windows rather than Linux. Why would you recomment Windows over, say, OS X. As someone who routinely uses all three, I find this mystifying, as the Mac seems clearly a better system for nearly all home users than Windows or Linux.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Does Redhat or the Fedora project plan on setting up guidelines for minimizing the chaos involved with using multiple 3rd-party repositories...
That's called Fedora Extras. It's just getting started.
What is the meaining of life and can Linux do it? And... Can I trade you two nickels for a dime? I need stuff out of the vending machine, you insensitive clod... Thanks.
How the hell do you say your last name?
Why is the AMD64 version of RHEL WS 3.0 so expensive? With a disproportionate number of x86-64 owners likely to be Linux users, the rapid growth of x86-64 sales, and given that the engineering effort to port to x86-64 had to have been a helluva lot less than what it took to port to the niche-market Intel Itanium, I don't understand Red Hat's pricing decision, especially given the much more modest 64-bit premiums charged by other Linux vendors. Since Microsoft has dropped the ball on x86-64 support in Windows (release version at some ambiguous date well into 2004), why isn't Red Hat using this as an opportunity to rack up sales?
.iso set of Fedora for x86-64. Obviously I want to recommend RHEL to business users though.
For personal use, I'm anxiously awaiting the first beta
What should customers that run small business networks using your standard product and Up2date service but do not need or cannot justify full enterprise products do now? What distribution would you recommend we switch to if neither of your offerings will suit their needs in the near future?
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
How do you feel about mares?
After spending too much time navigating the morass of .pdfs and recursive links on the Red Hat website, reading trade articles, etc. I still haven't figured out what the official red hat answer is.
Can an existing RH9 system be replaced by a RHEL V3 system without downgrading packages? I can't go to a prior release of RHEL because the software is too old for our needs.
Will my existing 200 up2date "enterprise" subscriptions (currently used to support RH7.3 and RH9.0 systems) still be useable if I migrate the OSes to RHEL v3(a titanic task, I might add, since we still are three systems short of finishing our migration from 6.2)?
We are seriously reconsidering our long-standing commitment to Red Hat, because we feel somewhat abandoned at this point. Nobody here has a week of free time available to read through every piece of fine print on the Red Hat site.
Mr.Szulik, what do you plan to do about RHCE certification? Will the non-enterprise certifications still hold any significance? or are you coming up with certification for Fedora?
It seems to me like this is a "Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can aim for the head?" opportunity.
I am a longtime RedHat user and afficionado, now feeling uncertain about recommending -anything- RedHat.
The reason for this is twofold.
Firstly, I feel burned by the early demise of support for RH9.
Secondly, and much MUCH more importantly, there is very very little chance of me recommending installation of an OS that I will not be running at home.
How will you combat this lack of word-of-mouth support (given that most people are like me in that they will not recommend something they have not tried themselves...)?
Hi,
I have been using Linux for around eight years, and have been using RedHat Linux for around six years. I have found the RedHat Linux OS extremely valuable, and I greatly appreciate the investment RedHat has made in integrating, updating, and testing each release. Despite this, I must admit that I have never purchased RedHat support for my personal use. This is largely due to my developer background and my history with Linux. I have, however, recommended RedHat Linux to other developers, system administrators, and managers. I have also been involved in the corporate decision making process for support contracts.
The recent RedHat/Fedora transition has been confusing, and I am currently unsure what to recommend for some cases. (As an example, I can't recommend to a fellow developer who wishes to try a system prototype on linux that he/she start by paying a $200 license fee.) It is abundantly clear that RedHat no long wishes to offer commercial support for their freely downloadable Linux version; however, I do not understand where Fedora fits in.
So, onto my question -- Will RedHat continue to invest the same amount of developer time, equipment, and resources to ensure that Fedora core releases are timely, well tested, well integrated, and that critical bugs in the most recent release are addressed, OR does the Fedora project represent a large departure from free downloads, with corporate assets being redirected to enterprise clients?
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 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"?
Need a UNIX/Linux/network guru in the Boulde
For $99 Australian (equivalent of $70 US).
If I purchase a RedHat Enterprise WS CD set and recompile it from scratch to not include and RedHat logos nor anaconda, do you or your lawyers have a problem with that?
(not like this will ever make it to list. But wth)
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?
--
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Matt. I have enjoyed using RedHat since 4.2. I have a LOT of systems I run on RH. How difficult is it going to be in the future to set up a box, go to the errata page for updates - and expect them to be current - like the latest Apache bug that RH has not patched?
Is it time to switch to Immunix?
Inquiring minds want to know....
.sig
On the off chance that Redhat, as a corporation, reads all of these messages regardless of whether or not they make it to the interview session, I want to add my twenty cents.
First off, although there are many ways to exit a market, your comments pissed almost everyone off. Why you would trash the efforts of so many developers who worked their butts off to help build an alternative desktop is beyond me. You can be sure that 90% of them will refrain from helping spread any Redhat products in the future.
Second, as a small business owner, I must add my voice to the chorus shouting "ASSHOLES!" for giving us the shaft, along with the education community. I will switch all of my software and advise the clients I have to switch with me to Debian. We probably should have started with it in the first place.
As for servers (I run and several and I am responsible for the intsitution of Redhat on several THOUSAND servers here in Kansai, throughout Japan and the world) NONE, I repeat NONE of them will touch Redhat Enterprise with a thousand foot pole if I can help it.
A great many of those machines are dell rack servers - here's hoping that Debian works allright on them too.
So, the overall question is the standard -
Why would you ever imagine that we would happily accept your decision and actually switch to the enterprise service?
Just me venting.
- Jeff -
It was also because of the free-strategy and GNU policy for added distribution packaging software that I recommended Red Hat Linux to hunderds of system administrators and IT managers in Belgium and across Europe (as CEO of LIFE and European Manager of VA Linux Systems).
I assume this is a good move on the short term, with an instant increase of Red Hat Enterprise licensees. But all the enterprise users we spoke to, said they were looking "were everybody was going to". A lot of them are looking at Debian. We suggested them to take a look at the zero-configuration CDdistro KNOPPIX to have a sneak preview of the capabilities of Debian, on the server and the Desktop.
Also, saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop is an insult to all sysadmins who demonstrate Linux's capabilities to their management and user base.
So the question is: What is the difference in strategy and product between Red Hat Advanced Server and Caldera OpenLinux when other as capable (or even technologically better according to some) distributions are freely available?
Sub-question (just for the karma): Will Red Hat degrade further on the Caldera road and become the next SCO?
Redhat became a kind of standard, because nearly everyone was using it. Thus your best hope for getting an app to run was on Redhat, because it was a defacto standard.
In the future, if everybody except the big corporates starts running Fedora, then won't Fedora become the new standard and the Red Hat enterprise thingy will become an also-ran?
Sure, in theory the big corporates want more stability, less updates. But when push comes to shove will they be able to handle running an OS that is marginalised to a small fraction of the Linux market, let alone the entire OS market? You may find them running Fedora, simply because it is more standard. Or Redhat may lose the OS market to a different Linux vendor.
Why is the above analysis not correct?
Just three questions....
Are you really the CEO of Redhat? Really? YOU?
Rick Pezzimenti Programmer/Analyst Denso International Australia
i would never hire your big holed floppy ass.
I was interested in the new approach of your business model where your company is moving in the direction of courting Fortune 500 companies with your enterprise server configurations and support. Redhat is simultaneously halting development on the consumer level product that has the most name recognition of any Linux distribution. You are giving up the free exposure that got you to where you are now. Yes, we all understand that you are replacing this with Fedora. What the fuck are you thinking?
a slut did tulsa
Crazy business decisions are often pushed by a single shareholder who can convince key persons of the profitablity of the idea. This probably happenend with VA Linux ending their Linux business, SCO suing IBM and Red Hat saying Linux is no longer free (because they own the copyrights on the Red Hat logos).
Which shareholder launched this idea?
Linux offered great deal of opportunity for self-study and it starts to look on a resume.
Obviously, at corporate IT, RedHat Linux sounds best.
Now self-studying RedHat Linux has just become impossible. Ironic, that it will be much easier to get an unlicenced copy of a Windows server than a free copy of RedHat. Fedore just won't sound the same on a resume.
On a long run, RedHat is going to shoot itself on the foot if the company makes it hard or impossible for students, beginner IT professionals, outside the large corporate IT departments to learn RedHat by using it.
RedHat will also loose several small or medium business opportunities. If business owners will have to choose what to pay for - Microsoft will win big time.
Nobody will take the risk and commit his/her carrier to introduce free Fedora for companies who can't afford enterprise RedHat.
It seems that over the last few months, management and top investors are selling a LOT
of stock. Is this just for tax purposes & diversification? Or are you guys thinking you
want to cash in before SuSE eats your lunch?
n/t
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You took the desktop linux distribution away from redhat. Did you realize this is the same as...
1.) taking Steve Jobs away from apple?
2.) taking Bath Ruth away from the red sox?
3.) taking the world trade center out of NY?
There are some things money can NEVER buy.
Why does it seem Red Hat has been trying to make my stock dive faster then it already is? Any suggestions on where to reinvest my Red Hat stock?
I guess my question would be, who made the decision to drop the Red Hat Linux consumer version, and concentrate on Enterprise solutions. Was this a management decision or a company decision?
I'm not saying it was right or wrong, and to be honest i'm happily composing this on a FC1 box, but i'm just curious if the developers at Red Hat, who really are why the company is where it is today, wanted to go down this road, or if it was a monitary decision. I'm not out to bash one way or another, but am genuinely interested in the reasons.
Btw, thank you very much for everything you have given the community, it is truely appreciated.
Whats Matt have to say about freedesktop.orgs new X server? Suddenly Linux has the abilities of OSX and Longhorn right now and not 2 years from now. Is linux ready or not?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Q: What is the errata policy for The Fedora Project?
A: Security updates, bugfix updates, and new feature updates will all be available, through Red Hat and third parties. Updates may be staged (first made available for public qualification, then later for general consumption) when appropriate. In drastic cases, we may remove a package from The Fedora Project if we judge that a necessary security update is too problematic/disruptive to the larger goals of the project. Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base. Updates will be available for two to three months after the release of the subsequent version; that is, updates for Fedora Core 1 will be provided for two to three months after the release of Fedora Core 2, and so forth.
Red Hat will not be providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for resolution times for updates for The Fedora Project. Security updates will take priority. For packages maintained by external parties, Red Hat may respond to security holes by deprecating packages if the external maintainers do not provide updates in a reasonable time. Users who want support, or maintenance according to an SLA, may purchase the appropriate Red Hat Enterprise Linux product for their use.
====
(note 1) So we get the updates, but without an SLA. Were we getting one with RHN anyway?
(note 2) To all the universities that want external support for their systems, might I suggest you start up your own RHN-equivalent? If you all band together, you will certainly have the bandwidth and the budget needed!
-- Askari: Give JavaScript the bird.
One of the hallmarks of RedHat Linux is the excellent quality and stability of the installation program as well as the overall stability of the OS. Given that Fedora will not have access to RedHat QA, how can users expect Fedora releases to be as reliable as a RedHat release? QA is not fun to do. People have to be paid to do it well. This could be an impediment to Fedora.
Giving upon the RedHat distibution could be thought of as giving away potential customers. Each RedHat user you loose to another distribution, is a potential paying customer lost.
RedHat's current success could be attributed to luring paying customers from the ranks of 'free distro' users. Selling to these users isn't too hard, they already realize the value of the OS.
Eliminating that base could be a potential disaster in that you have made your pool of potential customers smaller... How can this be an effective business model?
Linux may not be the best desktop OS available today, but it may very well be the best development environment available today. C/C++, Perl, Python, Java, Fortran--you name it; they are all available at no cost on Linux. It seems to me that makes Linux a no-brainer for middle schools and high schools trying to teach computer science.
If a big name like RedHat or Novell were to put together a "Computer Lab" solution that tied in tightly to a linux-powered enterprise and allowed you to network boot various specialized images... you know, something really focused on the 6-12 education arena... Wouldn't that increase the adoption of Linux in education, and buy future mind-share? Wouldn't it seed a whole generation who can spend the next 20-40 years building the future?
I'm not talking about targeting desktop users in school. I'm talking about targeting tomorrow's developers--the ones who will build the desktops of the future.
I have downloaded Fedora, and started the install process. Everything went fine until I reached the EULA, where I was forced to agree to abide by RedHat's interpretation of the Trademark law, or not use the system.
I am used to proprietary companies doing the exact same process with EULAs because they feel the Copyright law does not give them what they provide. They therefor try to wrestle more out of you by making you "sign" a contract. This practice has long been frowned upon by the FOSS community.
And now Fedora seems to do just that! If your interpretation of the trademark law is valid, and I am truly not allowed to distribute verbatim copies of Fedora without removing your trademarks, why do you need an EULA to enforce it? Couldn't you settle for a screen that says "Fedora and RedHat are trademarks of RedHat, read blah blah before redistributing"?
I understood when you introduced these restrictions on RedHat. After all, if your name is what makes the sell, you deserve to profit from that. But wasn't Fedora brought to the world precisely so that this will no longer be necessary?
I have been a linux user since version 0.9 of the kernel. Although I can freely download Redhat, I have bought copies whenever it is available locally - my first Redhat (i think this is version 4 and i still have the box) was bought online.
The main reason I have been buying redhat all these years was to support the development of Linux.
Now, I read that Redhat is stopping its distribution of a version for users like me. This really sucks because now I have to find some other Linux distribution to use because the low-end version of their enterprise suite is too much money to spend on my part.
I don't think this is good for Redhat in the long haul. If you take a look at the long history of M$, they started out as a Desktop OS (MSDOS). They succeeded simply because they evolved from an OS that almost every computer user is familiar with and this started to trickle into their server business. Most of the issues about M$ (besides cost) has been about security. If they fix this then Windows will be a competitive OS in the enterprise.
What Linux needs right now is to be united, it is spread so thinly (you even have to let an ordinary user decide whether to use GNOME or KDE). If everyone would be more united then we would have the best (if not the perfect) desktop/server OS. If that happens, I hope I don't have to spend so much money just to use an OS on my desktop.
Currently, RH Linux takes the US linux user market share by a considerable margin, and the small business user market by a huge margin (surely I'm not only only admin at an ISP/hosting company running dozens of RHL boxes as opposed to any other distro). However, the recent announcement by RedHat to discontinue the traditional all-purpose RHL product line and instead go with the high-end RHEL line (unquestionably geared for large businesses) caused quite a stir here. I completely understand RedHat's desire to devote the most resources to what would hopefully be a more profitable venture (namely RHEL), but I have to ask how much time has been given to considerations of the value of linux small business market dominance. If small businesses who just entered the linux market feel they cannot afford to implement the new RHEL, they may very well have the choice between Fedora and another distro. True, many who are familiar with RedHat and have been keeping track of their product changes may very well choose Fedora, but just as many may at that point decide to jump ship to another distro. It seems to me that by keeping a "baseline" free product just carrying the name "RedHat Linux" RedHat would do better to maintain market dominance, as opposed to possibly losing that lead to another distro just because of the lost name. To more directly ask the question: Can you honestly say that the number of business users using RHEL + Fedora a year down the road will be near the amount of users now running RedHat Linux? Granted, most of these aren't paying a thing. But market share is a value in and of itself to be sure.
Dear Mr. Szulik,
Why are you such a fuckity fuck, and why did Redhat Linux suck so bad?
What do you think about "componentized" Linux approach like Progeny?
What do you think anout Ramson Love joining to Progeny?
Why RedHat doesn't have one RedHat Developers Network (RDN) and one RedHat Partner Networks (RPN)?
What will be the RedHat position for Linux on embedded devices?
Mr Szulik,
I work for a consulting firm that, amongst others, provide services based on OSS products. Some of them are quite big projects, running at $3 million+. However, I found that Red Hat's pre sales support is appalling (compared to HP, IBM, Veritas, Sun etc). Simple questions go unanswered, and when you're busy with a tender document, you can't wait around for a week to find out if X will work with Y.
Last week I requested pricing about the CMS system advertised on your web site (Also as part of a huge tender). The page said I should get into contact with sales through the web site. I requested the info, and I'm still waiting for something as simple as a price!
So my question: Why don't you care about potential customers, or are too arrogant to answer questions, or even help with tenders that want to use your products. Do you plan to change this any time soon?
Btw, this is not a troll, I've been stuck waiting for RH answers many time, and it's frustrating.
And a last comment, your London offices are the worst. Nobody around there with a clue is ever available. They never return calls and emails. And questions like "is it advisable to run SAMBA with LDAP on a clustered setup" gets answered with "there's some HOWTOs on the Internet, go read it". Very unacceptable.
Home users might embrace Fedora for the desktop, but not many admins are likely to put it on servers. Without the input from the professionals, Redhat will lose a valuable resource in improving not only Fedora, but also RHEL. As for the professionals who switch to RHEL, I doubt they'll be willing to provide debugging help to Redhat after having paid a couple of thousand per machine. Those people will be expecting answers, not questions, so they'll never compensate for the lost input from RHL professionals gone.
Novel Lost the mid 90s server wars to Microsoft, just because it did not have a desktop offering. At the time, Although Novel had a superior technology in the field of file/print servers, they depended on Microsoft for the client, and expected Microsoft to play nice. Everyone knows that Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market eventualy made them also a big player in the (low-end) server market, and win the war with Novel. Mr.Szulik, now that you have adviced home and SOHO users to use Windows, don't you think you are making the same mistakes that Novel did? People tend to go wit integrated soloutions. If it is Windows on the desktop, then they would rather also have Windows on the server. Don't you think, that your push in the Enterprise Desktop Market, and leaving the SOHO and the Academia markets, is going to cost you in the server market?
--
Educational and R&D institutes have been the earliest adopters of Linux and have acted as crucibles for Linux development. While other software vendors have discounted site licenses for such institutes for their products, why has RH not announced similar scheme for your RHEL offering ? Kindly note that such institutes need long-term security patch availability but no installation related support.
You gave up without much of a fight in the desktop market. What makes you think you'll be any more succesful against some very well-established server vendors in the enterprise market? If you can't hack it there either, what's the next step? PDAs?
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
A nice open-ended question: where do you see Red Hat and Linux in 5 years time? Or in other words, what do you predict the Linux world will be like then?
Way back when linux was born we never thought that it would gain such popularity spontaneously.Came a company that decided to take the best of both worlds, a great product together with fast-growing and devoted followers and packaged it up for the corporate/professional world. It seemed to have made a large dent in the competition's product line until one day that company decided to drop the non-corporate followers and focus on where the money is. My logic says that you now have a "homeless" community and its just a question of time before someone is going to pick them up and even charge them (but not a-la enterprise model).In my mind a company that will do so for the desktop products will guarantee the future for corporate contracts (and possibly switches on the enterprise lines). After all a "small" follower at night is the decision maker during the day - in my company's case case you just lost thousands of desktops that are looking for a new distribution and if we like that "new" distribution we might eventually recommend it for the enterprise. What was the thinking behind your latest decision with regards to the linux community and if money was the issue why weren't you considering raising the price or charging for your current offering?
Surely there are people at Red Hat who are sufficiently non-geek to realize that Linux offers too many choices for the average user. Doesn't Red Hat know it has sufficient mind-share to market:
. . . . The Red Hat Desktop
If "The Red Hat Workstation v1.0" CD makes all of the tough choices for the newbie/SOHO client... won't they be more likely to get it working the first time?
If they can get it working, surely a lot more will adopt it?
You don't need to claim "best;" you only need to say: "We know that it works." By making all of the tough choices for the newbie/SOHO client, you could advance Linux, and your brand big time. Just make sure the disk asks less than a dozen simple questions then installs a complete home or SOHO workstation environment including GUI, Office Suite, Browser, Multimedia etc.
Wouldn't a "branded" standard desktop advance the market share of Linux Desktop 200% in 6 months?
Why has RH avoided such a product?
In Nearly All Paradigms, Shift Happens.