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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?
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?
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
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.'"
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?
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
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
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?
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
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
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?
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?
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?
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?
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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.
What do you think are the implications of the Novell purchase of SuSe (and Ximian, for that matter)?
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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