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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.
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.
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
The mails RedHat has sent out have made it explicitly clear that up2date will have erratas posted to it until April 30, 2004. up2date will continue to work for the next 8 months, but no new erratas will be posted.
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 know for a fact that certain rather large research laboratories will be building and distributing something that will effectively be the Red Hat Enterprise offering. This seems, at the moment, to be the easiest migration path from RHL, although some people are thinkning about Debian.
Maybe you should talk to other labs in your field, and to labs that will be producing their own linux distributions, and see what works for you as a community.
" and has since moved to providing only the Server."
Not true, there is RHEL Workstation. This is the desktop edition, albeit for businesses only.
RedHat gave up on a consumer/small business distro for the desktop because there was no money there. They still have a desktop distro for the enterprise.
The community supported Fedora is their replacement for RHL. They got rid of the support costs of RHL while still providing a free distro and getting a testbed for new features that may make it into RHEL.
-- Jason
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."
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.