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.

Comments

Fedora

[radixvir]

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?

personal OS choice?

[BigGerman]

Which OS and desktop environments you, your colleagues and friends use every day?
thanks in advance for your honest and direct answer.

Small Business Market?

[gamartin]

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:

1. Moderate release cycle -- small businesses don't care about bleeding edge features
2. Security/errata updates -- small businesses need someone else to monitor these complex issues
3. Support available for at least 3 years -- small businesses do care about stability and hate forced upgrades
4. No per-machine licensing restrictions -- small businesses look to linux for cost savings and will not tolerate per-machine licensing; product must be installable on multiple machines to realize cost savings
5. Metered support options -- small businesses are willing to pay for actual support services used
6. No compliance audits -- small businesses do not have time for that type of crap

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?

SOHO Support?

[soloport]

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?

Re:SOHO Support?

[pivo]

I make a living by saving these people from hours and hours of servicing Microsoft patches, updates and malware.

If you didn't make money doing this, would you still do it? RedHat didn't make enough money providing updates for their desktop distribution, so they stopped doing it. Seems rational to me.

There's no sign up process for Fedora because it's no longer required, not because it's going away. What has changed is who's responsible for providing updates. It's now not RedHat's sole responsiblity, it's a community process just like Debian.

You need to take a deep breath, relax, and read the information at http://fedora.redhat.com

If you know what the answer will be...

[Jerf]

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.)

Why stab everyone else in the back?

[jazman]

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.