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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.
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?
Which OS and desktop environments you, your colleagues and friends use every day?
thanks in advance for your honest and direct answer.
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?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?
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
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.)
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?
I knew this question would show up quick. Let me sum up how this appears to me...Mr. Szulik, I am a laoyal Linux advocate and longtime user of Red Hat Software. I have downloaded the OS that you put together with your high paid developers (using your expensive bandwidth) ever since RH6.2. I can not understand why you are selling out and abandoning us....we got you where you are today.
Okay, so that may not be quite fair. However, I am guessing that the desktop was a financial loss for Red Hat. It was one that they cleverly supported, but a loss none the less. The fact that they supported it made a larger Linux base etc....and they benefited intangibly, but a board of directors will not tolerate intangible bennies only for long. A corporation is a math machine work plus money = more money that equation MUST be satisfied. Red Hat is going a natural route. When Linux is entrenched in many small-mid size corps then the desktop will be opened up. For now it is GENEROUS of Red Hat to support Fedora.
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.
A product losing money!= company losing money.
It's common place for a company to produce many products and for some to lose money but the company to come out with a profit thanks to the other products.
By getting rid of the "losers" the company can raise profits by doing "less"
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