Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds

The "Call for Questions" post for Mr. Szulik generated over 650 questions and comments, 32 of which were moderated +5 at the time we selected questions to send him. And unlike many CEO responses, Szulik's answers to the selected questions are his own, not PR-generated. (One clue is that they are not in perfect English, as interview responses or articles that are 'laundered' by PR or media relations departments almost always are.)

1a) up2date - by aldousd666

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 red hat in favor of the other flavors.

Szulik:

up2date as shipped with Red Hat Linux 9 will continue to function against the RHN servers for up to six months after RHL9 goes out of maintenance on April 30, 2004. Fedora includes an up2date that can speak with Yum and Apt repositories and can work completely without using the RHN servers. From a sysadmin's perspective, the tool is nearly identical to what was used before; it simply pulls the packages and data from a different location. It also lets you pull both official Fedora packages as well as third party packages created by other Fedora users and developers as well as create your own repository for packages you want to distribute among your own systems.

Users continuing with RHL9 past the end of its maintenance window will be interested in the Fedora Legacy Project, a community-driven continuation of updates for RHL9 and RHL7.3.

1b) Return on RHN Entitlements? - by Anonymous Coward

I would like to consider myself a red hat advocate. It was largely based on my recommendation that 50 RHN Entitlements for updating non-enterprise version of red hat GNU/Linux. My boss has since been rubbed the wrong way when RHN failed to "work as advertised" on August 29th. The best explanation that I have gotten from red hat is that it is "the nature of SSL" that forced manual upgrades of up2date & up2date-gnome for each system. In October, red hat 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 advertised (automated updates require manual updates after Aug 28th and a full year charge only provide 7 months of updates) then how does red hat expect advocates of red hat to successfully encourage the companies that have gotten burned to pay out even more for enterprise contracts?

Szulik:

The SSL issue in August was an unfortunate result of transition inside of RHN. Although it was a significant inconvenience to our users, it was actually the result of our own tight security policies, and at no time was the security of our service at risk. Numerous steps have been taken to ensure this does not reoccur.

The entitlement renewals that occurred shortly before our recent announcements were limited and stopped when the changes were announced. Although the end of life for RHL9 was announced when RHL9 was first released, many users are in a situation with entitlements going past the end of life for Red Hat Linux. For those in this position, entitlements to both Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and WS will be made available for the remainder of the subscriptions. in addition, discounts are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to any RHN customer.

2) Opportunity for small business - by salesgeek

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?

Szulik:

$25M is not a small business. It's about the size when someone crazy in your organization suggests that you go public. I believe that the IT industry has increasingly adopted a transactional and services model. Differentiated service skills around Open Source software will be in demand based upon the large transition which will occur over the next 10 years as businesses transition from proprietary to commodity hardware and open source software.

3) What's next? - by Mr. Sketch

For the average person, RedHat _is_ Linux. Who do you believe will replace you as being the defacto Linux distribution for the average person?

Szulik:

The definition of average should be clear. For the 'average' reader of Slashdot, the Fedora Project is the ideal Linux distribution. For the average knowledge worker in an office setting, we believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 WS is appropriate. For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par. We hope that consumer-focused technologies will thrive and mature in the Fedora Project setting. When the code is production quality, Red Hat will make them available as part of a supported distribution.

4) Server without Desktop? - by drinkypoo

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. red hat 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 red hat to take, and not the rest of the Open Source Unix community?

Szulik:

Recently we launched a statement of direction - Open Source Architecture for the enterprise. As more large customers move to distributed computing architectures, firms will want to leverage the flexibility and independence a integrated stack can create for a business. Our product line is being built through the delivery of software sold modularly. For example, our cluster suite.

5) If you could go back in time - by AftanGustur

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 Red Hat's business model?

Szulik:

Nothing. Three critical events occured during 1997-2000. Red Hat was able to capitalize itself for the long term. The Linux kernel continued to scale in performance and application availability with each increase in performance which helped to drive the enterprise adoption of Red Hat. These were matters of when and not if.

6) Will Red Hat become more proprietary? - by divec

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?

Szulik:

No. For over 10 years Red Hat has built relationships with developers, ISVs and customers on the brand promise of delivering software based upon the GPL license in collaboration with the Open Source community. If you look back over the past 5 years, you will see the failure of companies that were building hybrid models which could not deliver the consistent value of open source code over time.

7) Diverse Hardware Support - by capt.Hij

One of the biggest issues for putting gnu/linux on the desktop is more support for hardware. I understand why Red Hat is supporting Fedora and focusing more on industrial clients, but I am concerned about the long term implications. What will Red Hat be doing to increase hardware compatibility and support? Without an official Red Hat "civilian" distribution do you feel that you will have the ability to sway hardware manufacturers to support gnu/linux?

Szulik:

3 important activites will have to take place before we see a significant increase in GPL'd hardware driver support. A large marketplace develops, customer demand and a viable supplier exists to deliver and service the integration. I'd say we are at the early stages worldwide to respond to these requirements. Increasingly we are receiving more support as compared to 24 months ago. I believe the civilian version will be filled by Fedora which will develop into a solution for many.

8) Did The Consumer Stream Make A Profit? - by reallocate

Has Red Hat's shrinkwrapped consumer-level product stream ever made a profit? To your knowledge, has SUSE or anyone else over made a profit from consumer sales?

Szulik:

Profitable yes. Was a shrink wrapped version sold at retail an economic model to grow a company? No. discounts leave a small amount of available profit. I can not speak for SuSE economics as until recently they were private.

9) personal OS choice? - by BigGerman

Which OS and desktop environments you, your colleagues and friends use every day?

thanks in advance for your honest and direct answer.

Szulik:

I have not used proprietary software for many years. I run a 5 node Linux cluster at home. I use Gnome.

10a) Education and Research Markets - by Frater

I work for a world-renowned research institution. We have ~500 Red Hat Linux systems in labs and on desktops, mostly administered by scientists and technicians rather than central IT staff -- so keeping them up to date is a challenge.

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 [freshrpms.net] 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.

10b) Academics... - by PseudononymousCoward

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?

We have rolled out an education plan which was priced between $25 and $50 for client and server quantity one for an annual subscription. I believe the pricing and service relationship will begin to address a void filled by the Red Hat Linux transition at an affordable price.

10c) licensing issues - by painehope

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?

Szulik:

Painhope, my view of reasonable and your view of reasonable might be different. And I would like to take you up on your offer. Send me an e-mail and we will take you up on your offer. Keep in mind that we do not sell licenses. We sell subscriptions where the value of the bits are integrated with service levels. I believe our educational subscription plan will be seen as a good solution to opportunities like yours. And you are correct, most student computing activities must be supported by campus IT to get plugged into the campus network. Site license for $50k. For many public schools and university, this is a large sum.

Comments

User friendliness

[October_30th]

For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.

Why, oh why must it be so?

Why is it so hard to have real user-friendliness in Linux?

Re:User friendliness

[metallicagoaltender]

It's a catch-22 - the average Joe on the street doesn't want to touch Linux until it's friendly, but companies don't want to invest the time and money to get their goods working on Linux unless the user base is big enough to give them a good return on their investment.

Hell, I can see why the average person won't touch Linux - I bought a Radeon 9200 dual head video card 2 weeks ago, and after off-and-on screwing with it, I still haven't gotten both heads working at once, excluding cloned mode. Some soccer mom isn't going to want to be dicking with XF86Config while her kids are bitching about wanting to play Pokemon...she's going to want to boot into Windows, pop in the CD that came with the product, and have it work.

Re:User friendliness

[TedCheshireAcad]

No one wants to work on the little "niceities" that a user-oriented OS such as Windows or Mac OS X has. OSS developers want to work on the "cool" projects, that and for us, functionality is relative to the user. OSS developers tend to write software for developers, not your average Joe Sixpack.

Fine by me, though. I'm not afraid of the command line. :)

Re:User friendliness

[October_30th]

Because users are morons.

No, that's a cop-out answer of an elitist.

Answer me this: what will you lose if "the moron" users are able to simply plug in their scanner, external USB hard drive or an USB CD-RW drive and use it straight away?

Re:User friendliness

[slimak]

Many camera owners that use a Windows PC like use the software that came with the camera to download images -- thus far, there has been very limited support from manufacturers for linux. It is really a shame that someone like Canon does not create some linux software and include it with their cameras. Similar issues exist for other hardware, although exceptions exist such as USB mouse.

I have a PowerShot A70 that I use under linux with mild success -- this usually requries cycling the power on the camer a few times before I can get the images. This generally does not bother me, but I have a feeling my mom would be less than excited to do this.

Re:User friendliness

[Tarrek]

[Note: I am using any Linux commands as examples from personal experience, I am not taking the effort to ensure that the linux terminology I'm using is perfectly correct, because it's supposed to be an example from the lay-perspective anyway, so, no nitpicking my mount points, 'cause I don't care]

Just because it's not quite there yet, more than anything. I don't think anyone is claiming that Linux will never, ever, EVER be suitable for the mass market, but, well, damnit, it isn't yet. The console commands are confusing to those without experience with them, and they aren't always perfectly documented from the layman's perspective (something like "-con350 will shift my R-variable? Why the hell would I want to do that? What IS that?").

From someone without computer experience, what the hell is "mounting" a hard drive?

Where do you put your pictures? Not in "C:\pictures", but in "/mnt/users/username/home/pictuers" or somesuch.

Hey, how about "How does someone with no Linux experience install things?" - They don't. "That program I downloaded doesn't have an install file!"

It's a good OS. I've got two flavors triple booting on my machine, so I can learn it. It's absolutely great for coding. It's got solid support for the basics I want to use my computer for, and, with effort, I can always get whatever else I need to work- With effort, because I'm new to Linux, and because, thank god it's possible because I'm computer literate enough to know damn well that it will work *somehow*.

Re:User friendliness

[croddy]

"real user-friendliness" and "automated support of recent consumer hardware" are very different things. a lot of people find the GNOME and KDE desktop environments to be very user-friendly, as far as the current state of the Linux application base and hardware support go.

I, for one, find it very friendly that I can install and upgrade my OS for free, and that when I do so, it includes all of the things I need (web and internet applications, media software, graphics software, office and productivity) ... with the base installation.

as mr. szulik says, improved hardware support will depend on hardware manufacturers' cooperation, for the most part, and thankfully that has been improving of late.

Re:User friendliness

[Ktulu_03]

I have that same Camera, and was able to get Digikam to work very well with it. I didn't even have to select the camera model in KDE's peripheral's configuration in the Control Panel, the automatic button was able to detect it.

Epson in the past has seemed to be the best in terms of opening up specifications to write drivers for scanners and printers. I bought an epson scanner for that reason, and it works great under USB. I wish the other's would be as open as Epson seems to be.

Re:User friendliness

[The Irish Jew]

What the hell kind of soccer mom is going to be using a dual-head setup anyway? Oh yeah, none. Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. If her computer came w/ linux pre-installed she wouldn't have any problems.

Re:User friendliness

[Drantin]

well... i'm going to complain about your picture location anyway :-/

Why aren't you using something like '~/pictures'?

Re:User friendliness

[mark_space2001]

Personally, I think it's because real user friendliness is a QA issue. And not just QA of software but of a whole system, how all the modules and packages work together.

That's something that most "geek" projects have a hard time handling. It's just too large of a problem. They don't have the time or resources to QA their's and everyone else's work.

And as I think about it, it might be tough for a large company too. Take all that work and QA it, turn it into something useful. Hard, hard, and that's what most people like doing, right, is fixing some one else's work? Not.

So I was going to try to give you an answer but no I've talked myself out of it. Too big for geeks, and too big for companies too. I think perhaps we need a paradigm shift. Something that allows individual geek projects to work together better. Something like Extreme Distributed Software Engineering. So that the QA of an integrater for a distro is much smaller and easier.

Hmm, maybe this is a role that the DLC or OSDL could play.

Re:User friendliness

[13Echo]

Console commands aren't normally needed. That isn't to say that you can do everything without them, but the majority of Linux users would rather have it that way. It allows for flexibility. Unless people with complaints start writing GUI-based apps that change that, there will never be a change... And the geeks won't care.

Mounting a harddrive isn't necessary to do by hand with Automount. Most "user-friendly" distributions use it. Windows also "mounts devices" but the way the file system structure works is different. Drives (most often) get letter assingments, while UNIX devices get attached (or mounted) to a directory on the tree. Either way, with automount, it doesn't matter. Many distributions detect when a new drive is installed. From there, it configured the fstab for the device so it mounts on bootup.

In comparison to Windows machines, in which you have something like "C:\My Documents\Username\My Pictures", Linux isn't really any different. A lot of programs default to "/home/username/" for file storage. Is it hard to add a "Documents" folder with Nautilus? I use one on my machine, and it works rather well. Nautilus (and other file managers) default to opening the user's home directory... Not some directory in /mnt as mentioned. It would make no sense for a program to default to "/mnt/users/username/home/pictures".

Yes. Linux has install files. They are generally with the extension SH, BIN or RUN. Theyrun the same way that Windows EXE files work. Most commercial Linux games come this way. They are self extracting and have graphical installers in the majority of situations. The difficult part is that you often have to launch them from a shell window. Programs like Nautilus tend to load SH script files up as text files, unless you teach it to work differently. Not sure about the KDE side of things though.

Re:User friendliness

[JoeBuck]

Almost all Canon digital cameras work very well with Linux; you plug in the USB cable and go (provided that you've installed a gphoto2-based app such as gtkam or kamera). Some other brands don't work as well.

Digital cameras are actually an area where Linux does quite well (for some other devices it's a different story), and the Linux situation even has some advantages over the Windows situation. Consider the digital camera owner who visits a friend's house, and who brought her camera's USB cable. Can she upload her pictures to her friend's computer? If the friend runs Windows, probably not, if the friend has a different brand of digital camera. If the friend runs Linux, and it's one of the hundreds of supported camera models, it just works.

The Windows user could bring her software along as well and install it on the friend's computer, but this would violate the EULA and potentially subject her to prosecution!

I don't want digital camera makers to include binary-only drivers and put us in the same box that Windows users are in. Instead, they should document the protocol used on the USB cable, so that the gphoto2 people can add support (gphoto2, despite the "g", is used by both KDE and Gnome apps to access digital cameras) . Better yet, they can submit source code to the gphoto2 people.

Re:User friendliness

[bigox]

Not soccer moms, but clueless graphic designers and photographers. But of course, they have Macs to play with.

Re:User friendliness

[acidrain69]

He is talking about the symptoms of a greater problem. I can throw 2 video cards into windows 2000 and they just.... work. No crazy editting of the config files.

Granted, I have a dual monitor setup working in win2k and Debian, but I haven't had to set it up for a while, so I don't know if the configuration has gotten any easier. I have 2 machines on the desktop, and the dual monitor setup usually runs windows, with a single monitor-setup on a KVM for linux.

Re:User friendliness

[RobotRunAmok]

soccer mom

I suggest you find another under-represented-on-Slashdot group upon which to show your clueless-20-something prejudice and bias. My wife is the classic soccer mom, van and all, and has been modifying config files -- DOS then and Linux now -- when you were still wearing plastic pants.

Of course, when the kids want to play video games, she fires up the Xbox or GBA. Unlike you, she's smart enough to use the right tools for the job.

Games on your Linux box? At home? For kids? Ye gods, why?!?

Re:User friendliness

[danheskett]

To be fair to Microsoft, they're trying to move away from the harddrive concept so your photos will go in some virtual photo album named "My Pictures". Only the sys admin will know where they are really stored.

Thats really true. Windows XP works nice with the concept of removing where files are really stored from the user's mind. File selection dialog in Windows XP show "My Documents", "Shared Documents", "My Pictures", etc really well. So much so I am surprised how adept my family members are at using them and managing them and getting them into a working situation. Before file management was a real pain for them, because the concept of where stuff went - drives letters etc - was really hard to swallow.

Its a nice touch.. something worth copying a little more directly.

Re:User friendliness

[metallicagoaltender]

My wife is the classic soccer mom, van and all, and has been modifying config files -- DOS then and Linux now -- when you were still wearing plastic pants.

And does the average soccer mom have the same abilities as your wife? Survey says...nope. There are always going to be exceptions to the genealization, but they very rarely make a point invalid. The average person, be it soccer mom or not, isn't going to want to screw with their computer to get it working.

Unlike you, she's smart enough to use the right tools for the job.

And unlike you, I understand the concept of an example. :-)

Re:User friendliness

[pyros]

sufficient desktop market share that the peripheral makers get incompatibilities straightened out before release

Apple has sufficient market share to get device manufacturers to write drivers in the first place. I think it's rather that Apple has small enough market share to garuantee a consistent platform for device manufacturers to write stable drivers for.

Re:User friendliness

[Zoop]

My wife is the classic soccer mom, van and all, and has been modifying config files

By definition, this is not a classic soccer mom.

If you don't believe me, get some of her fellow moms from soccer practice and give a command line and ask them to install Slackware.

Or give them a DOS prompt and ask them to do anything.

Or give them Windows and ask them to go download, install, and run Mozilla.

This will educate you in ways those of us who didn't get a geek with breasts for a wife cannot.

Re:User friendliness

[CleverNickName]

For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.

Does it bother anyone else that the CEO of the most widely-known Linux distro keeps downplaying Linux? Why does Microsoft need to spread FUD when Szulik will do it for them?

When Mr. Szulik made this announcement about Fedora, I wrote the following to my LUG:

While I agree that Linux is not quite there for average users, I'd say that it's definitely in the last few yards of the marathon. It's too bad that he didn't take this opportunity to encourage hardware manufacturers to make fewer winmodems or winprinters or winwhatevers.

I'm very unhappy to hear the CEO of Red Hat adding some legitimacy to Redmond's FUD, even if it's a transparent effort to showcase Red Hat's Enterprise solution.

One of the reasons I chose Red Hat is precisely because it was so easy to install and configure. A major consideration was my digital camera, in fact.

Guess what? I plug it in, launch gtkam, and there it is. I've dumped thousands of photos into my machine that way. I only had to use the cli once, and that was because there wasn't an icon in the kicker by default.

The fact is, as long as the CE-freakin-O of Red Hat Linux says ". . . we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par." Linux will stay well behind Windows on the desktop.

This is like the CEO of Ford telling people that they'd be better off buying a Toyota, because Toyota has better cup holders and spiffy digital guages, instead of working harder to make Fords more attractive to buyers.

Re:User friendliness

[WinterSolstice]

This is a really important point:

MS Says: "We have the biggest installed base in the world. Write to us or die"

Apple Says: "We have the most consistent hardware and OS in the world. Please write to us, or we'll make you un-cool."

Linux Says: "\/\/3 4r3 1337 |-|4x0r5 4|\|d d0|\|7 |\|33d u."

IMHO, if there were a seriously stable API for Linux (and it is getting better), there would be more companies including support. It needs to be brainless for them, however.

-WS

Re:User friendliness

[prisoner-of-enigma]

And this is precisely the level of condescension that gives the Open Source movement such a bad name. It's a combination of "you ought to learn how to do it the hard way, like I did" and "you don't need to be able to do that the way you think you need to be able to do that".

Doesn't sound like much of a problem to you? Could you possibly be any more self-centered? It doesn't matter one damn bit whether or not you think it's a problem or not, dammit! It matters that somewhere, somebody may think it's a genuine problem for them, and that problem may seem insurmountable enough to dissuade them from using Open Source stuff. Your desire to easily shrug this off is a symptom of a disease called elitism, and it's rampant here at Slashdot.

You want Linux to overtake Microsoft on the desktop? You'd better figure it out pretty damned quick that people want things to work, and right now most things that interest average consumers work better on Windows than on Linux. Even Matthew Szulik mentions in his replies that your average consumer seeking to get their digital camera working will not be well served by any flavor of Linux. Your answer? "Oh, you don't really need to do that." Keep it up. Microsoft needs people like you.

Re:User friendliness

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Political agenda? Where in the blue hell did you come up with that? There's no politics in my post, just simple observations. The great Linux annointed feel their stuff is so damned superior that everyone should run it everywhere. After all, you never hear any damned shortage of "Microsoft sucks" posts whenever there's a problem with something from Redmond. Then follow the inevitable "Microsoft will die, Linux will rule" posts, all extolling the virtues of Open Source and how it will take over everything. What these idiots fail to realize is that you can't take over something you're not willing to accomodate, and Linux is not the most accomodating thing out there.

As for your assertion that free OS coders "owe this somebody nothing", you're again treading awfully close to elitism. On the one hand, the Open Source community claims that having billions of eyeballs on the code is a good thing because problems get fixed. But when somebody wants something that nobody wants to implement, there is no leverage. Short of learning C++, that person is SOL. Doesn't sound like a very egalitarian way of running software. It sounds an awful lot like "Hey, you're not paying for this, so shut up and enjoy whatever I give you." Yeah, that's customer service with a smile, ain't it? That's sure to draw lots of new users.

And if you're not part of that great "movement" to have Microsoft replaced with a penguin, good for you! I'm proud of the fact that you realize there are multiple OS's out there and enough choices to satisfy everyone. Believe it or not, I'm on your side with that argument. I don't *mind* Linux being kept a hacker OS so long as the Linux zealots will finally shut up about how superior they are to Microsoft. "Better" is far too relative a term to be applied when comparing OS's.

Re:User friendliness

[rifter]

You're probably right, there probably won't be (m)any soccer mom types with dual head setups.. but for the ones that do exist, it should be as easy as plugging it in in order to get a wider desktop acceptance of linux.. I want to be able to plug in my PDA or digital camera or whatnot and just have it work like in OS X or Windows..

Actually, this anti grandma and soccer mom attitude reflects the myopia of most geeks. Think about it. About 5-10 years ago, how many soccer moms emailed their friends, took digital pictures, scanned documents and photos, used the internet, and burned CDs? Pretty fucking close to 0, but why? Because it was a pain in the ass to do it and they had no idea why they would want to go through the trouble. But I can promise you 99% of soccer moms with a computer do all of these things now. In fact, I have found that non-geeks do these kinds of things more often than geeks in many cases. But they do it because now you can just buy product X at comp-uselessa and take it home and it works.

Have you all forgotten why we built the personal computer in the first place? It was supposed to empower the users to do things they had not done before. It was supposed to make people's lives easier. And the degree to which it does is the degree to which it is adopted by Joe Sixpack and his wife. Now they can shoot their own family pictures and movies on digital cameras, create a dvd complete with menus, and mail it to grandma. Or they can email those same pictures and movies to grandma. This is, again, becasue hardware and software was developed to the point that ease-of-use was there.

To those who say that the Soccer mom does not use dual monitors; for shame. If they had a mac they were doing that for ages. For several years Windows soccer moms were using dual monitors. Why? Why? Why? Well first off why do *you* use dual monitors? That's right, you do it so you can do more at once, with more screen and/or desktop real estate. How many normal users have you met that did not have 5000 things on their desktop because it's easier to find there? Does it not make sense for them to have twice as much space for them to clutter just as they buy an SUV with twice as much space to clutter? And if they can do it easily, they will do it.

All hail Microsoft, the Marketing Genious.

[nberardi]

Well it looks like the world of Red Hat on the desktop is going like the over zelouse dot-com's. I really think this is sad, because all that it does is make Linux more eliteist, beause now there is no brand that people really associate with Linux. In addition this pushes Microsofts Desktop further, because Microsoft is a brand, Linux isn't, and the most recongized brand in Linux has just folded up shop for the Desktop.

I see this as a trend and Red Hat is trying to compete with IBM on the server market. If you notice every year IBM offers less and less in the desktop hardware and everybody is moving twords the enterprise servers to pick up money. This allows Microsoft to suck up more of the market share on the desktop. In addition the way things are going now, with .Net and webservices, Microsoft is going to dominate even the server market, because if they can convince you to buy their servers and program applications on *nix in Mono to take advantage of that, they win.

Because like it or not Exchange and SQL2000 are far more advanced than anything Linux has to offer. And now that their are interfaces, people are going to try and put out applications in *nix with Mono. Only forcing companies in the long run to buy Microsoft Servers and might as well buy Desktops too, because .Net will be .Net where ever you go.

All hail Microsoft, the Marketing Genious.

Re:All hail Microsoft, the Marketing Genious.

[Salsaman]

Because like it or not Exchange and SQL2000 are far more advanced than anything Linux has to offer.

More advanced than Oracle ?

And now that their are interfaces, people are going to try and put out applications in *nix with Mono. Only forcing companies in the long run to buy Microsoft Servers and might as well buy Desktops too, because .Net will be .Net where ever you go.

Personally, I never plan to develop with mono. Gtk+ works well enough for me. And I don't know of any other Linux developers who plan on using mono either.

Besides, if RH are pulling out of the desktop market, that just leaves more room for the other distro's.

Re:All hail Microsoft, the Marketing Genious.

[Dcnjoe60]

This could also be a great opportunity for some of the other distros. Like you said, Redhat is the Linux company with name-brand recognition, but they never really supported the desktop very well. Now with them stepping aside, maybe one of the more desktop oriented distros (is anyone listening at Mandrake?) will step up and fill the void.

painehope...

[herrvinny]

Painhope, my view of reasonable and your view of reasonable might be different. And I would like to take you up on your offer. Send me an e-mail and we will take you up on your offer. Keep in mind that we do not sell licenses. We sell subscriptions where the value of the bits are integrated with service levels.

How much is Redhat going to ask for per CPU? painehope gave an example of $50 per CPU for a 512 node machine, $35 per CPU for a 1024 CPU machine, etc. How much is his 4000 node machine going to cost?

All in all, a good interview. Szulik even runs a Linux cluster at home! very nice.

Moderation Limitation?

[VernonNemitz]

Perhaps for Interview questions, the moderation system might be modified to remove the limit of +5?

Re:Moderation Limitation?

[beacher]

Heh.. Just seeing the question

Are you waiting for Microsoft to buy you out? (Score:45, Flamebait)

would make my day

Re:Moderation Limitation?

[Hell O'World]

Perhaps for Interview questions, the moderation system might be modified to remove the limit of +5?

I've been thinking about that for a while now, but I've realized that to do it right it would really require a separate system of "interview only" mod points. This is because there needs to be a bigger pool of points when the interview questions come out, and having them in the same pool would dilute their value.

It's not clear to me how well this would work, but there is definitely a problem with the +5 limit on interviews. Did he really answer the 10 that people wanted to hear? Just trying the experiment of lifting the cap might be informative. Perhaps trial and error could find a solution. After all, that is apparently how the Slashdot system was developed in the first place. The concept of user moderation is great, it appeals to my sense of democracy and free speech. There are so many variations on this theme of user moderation, and slashcode works pretty well for most things. But I always wonder if there could be a new twist to solve the little problems and make it better.

He skipped the Edu questions...

[zoomba]

I like how he totally breezed over the educational institution questions, which were of particular interest to me as a net admin at a big 10 univ who also has RedHat machines to maintain that will soon be completely unsupported. I need to maintain a lab of computers that dual-boot to Linux and WinXP, and RH9 is the best desktop Linux solution out there currently. I don't have the budget to get the Enterprise edition, so what am I supposed to do when the support runs out?

-Mike

Re:He skipped the Edu questions...

[Erwos]

Buy the acadmic version of RHEL. You can get a site license for $2500 and install it on as many computers as you want, AND get support. A good deall, it seems.

-Erwos

Re:He skipped the Edu questions...

[i.r.id10t]

There was a posting here on /. regarding educational pricing and educational versions. $25 for the WS version and $50 for the ES version, with more CPU support than the regular ES version.

Re:He skipped the Edu questions...

[love2hateMS]

Red Hat just announced very low pricing plans for .edus. I don't have the URL available, but look into it. I was quite surprised how inexpensive they were.

Odd response to questions 10a/b/c

[cioxx]

It seems to me than rather addressing the issue and assuring customers that educational instutution strategy and licensing will be prioritized, Szulik goes on to pitch a deal (on slashdot, no less) to the person asking the question.

And I would like to take you up on your offer. Send me an e-mail and we will take you up on your offer.

I'm not amused. Clearly, Red Hat isn't doing enough to accommodate educational facilities with discounted volume licensing.

Re:Odd response to questions 10a/b/c

[GigsVT]

Sure thing:

REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

Red Hat EULA

Now before you say "But that's just the support agreement!", note that it's impossible to purchase RHEL without agreeing to it. You can download src.rpms and compile it all yourself, but if you purchase even one single copy, you are subject to that agreement, and then couldn't increase the number of installed servers even by downloading and compiling clean src.rpms. This obviously violates the GPL, if enforced this way. Another section of this agreement says that "nothing here should be taken to override the GPL", but if that's true, why do they even say the first part at all?

I sure don't want my company to be the test case in court to see if the agreement is unenforcable or not.

Here's an article about it:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/10/HNr edhat balk_1.html

Digital Camera Comment

[DG]

Oddly enough, my main home machine is a RedHat 8 Athlon 2100+

My wife has a digital camera, and it Just Works. Plug in the camera, start "Digital Camera Tool" from the Gnome start menu, download pics. No shell window required.

My non-techie wife has no problems with it at all.

Now getting the Espon C82 printer to print photos with any sort of colour fidelity was a weekend of build-CUPS-from-scratch HELL - but the camera was a no-brainer.

The RedHat desktop user experience is nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be.

DG

Re:Digital Camera Comment

[ThrasherTT]

I'm sorry, but it sounded to me like you just contradicted yourself! The comment he made about digital cameras not "just working" makes the desktop user experience out to be bad. OK, so you go on to tell us that you didn't have a problem with that, but you did have a hellish experience with something else that might even be considered related to digital camera usage on the desktop. Then you tell us that the desktop experience isn't as bad as he is making it. Um, wtf? "build-CUPS-from-scratch HELL" doesn't sound like a good desktop experience.

I'm not saying that other OSes don't have their problems, but in my experience (I use linux at work, at home, and on my laptop), and in the experience of my linux-using (not as in drug-using) peers, the desktop user experience of RedHat leaves something to be desired.

Re:Digital Camera Comment

[FooBarWidget]

I spent a weekend trying to get my Epson C82 working under Windows XP too! Don't think Windows is perfect.

perfect English

[benjonson]

[U]nlike many CEO responses, Szulik's answers to the selected questions are his own, not PR-generated. (One clue is that they are not in perfect English, as interview responses or articles that are 'laundered' by PR or media relations departments almost always are.

Ah. If you speak well, you must be insincere?

Hardware support will help a great deal

[yerricde]

"Real user friendliness" with respect to mass-market peripherals requires the support of the manufacturer of each peripheral. Until we see a SANE driver next to the TWAIN driver on the CD that comes with a scanner or camera, there is little that the community can do, especially if a manufacturer refuses to disclose its peripherals' wire protocols to the community.

Time travel?

[mikeophile]

If you could go back in time with the knowledge you have to day, and live the dot-com years for a second time.

Darl McBride, you have been scheduled for termination.

A bit obsequious, no?

[Otter]

And unlike many CEO responses, Szulik's answers to the selected questions are his own, not PR-generated. (One clue is that they are not in perfect English, as interview responses or articles that are 'laundered' by PR or media relations departments almost always are.)

That seems a bit obsequious to me given the actual information provided. Except for a few tidbits about discounts for continuing support customers, was there a single piece of real information in there?

It's not like he was offering answers like Marcelo Tosatti's -- the fawning "No marketing here!" comment seemed a bit excessive.

RHEL/Pro/Academic Product Differentiation

[ewwhite]

But my main question wasn't answered. I wanted to know about the shadiness surrounding the Red Hat Enterprise, Professional Workstation and Academic versions. The latter two seem to be rebadged/repackaged versions of Enterprise WS.

My original comment from the Q&A article.

Why isn't Red Hat actively marketing their Professional Workstation Product? Apparently, this is a newly-released offering that hasn't been receiving much attention. It's odd, because it's not even displayed prominently on their site.

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. It's the same product as Red Hat Enterprise Workstation. I purchased it from my local Microcenter for $99. Here's the RPM list.

It looks like this product was a last-minute addition.... Apparently, it's not crippled or relabeled.

Given my previous rants on Slashdot about the Red Hat shadiness, this looks like a good option.

Even more interesting is the fact that Red Hat didn't put much effort into product differentiation with this Professional Workstation product. I opened the box and the CDs were labeled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS". Well, only the first CD was labeled as such. The other CDs are identical to the Red Hat Enterprise AS/ES offering and include the same RPMS/SRPMS. SRPMS build cleanly in every test case I tried. So, buying this and using Enterprise 3.0 SRPMS for future updates is entirely possible. The same RHEL patched 2.4.21 kernel is there, too. Nifty.

Another issues that bugged me about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux move was the poor upgrade path. Reinstalling the OS on production servers that are running Red Hat 7.x or 8 ain't pretty. So, my final test with the Professional Workstation was prompted by a half-page paragraph in the manual that came with the box set.... It stated that in-place OS upgrades were only available for Red Hat Enterprise 2.1 -> Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 systems (via "linux update" at boot)...... however, you have the option of booting the install CD with "linux updateany" to relax the restriction "in case your /etc/issue file is damaged". Hmm.... No version-checking, eh? So I performed a test in-place upgrade on an existing Red Hat 8.0-equipped Proliant server...... It totally worked without a hitch!

This, along with the education and bulk-pricing deals leads me to believe that the Red Hat marketing department is working hard to appeal to the people it alienated with its announcements over the past few weeks. But it may not be enough. How can enyone plan for the future when Red Hat seems to be a moving target? We'll see what happens come December 31.

and the loooooosers are: academics!

[dummkopf]

yet again it seems that academia bites the dust. redhat seems to have moved over to corporate servers, yet they do not want to offer a "service-less" product for academia. we do not need service from redhat, we need a GOOD and STABLE OS for a REASONABLE price -- and updates, of course.

So please, RH, think over your policies. Academia is a big market and we like redhat, so do not take us away from you.

As a side note: I called RH UK last week Thursday. I am still waiting for the promised email from Mrs. Alonso regading my questions about RH Professional Workstation, which seems to be the answer academia is waiting for. All I need to know is if RH is willing to sell their RHEL WS software with access to up2date for a reasonable price and what the licensing conditions are. Can we buy more RHN subscriptons and get just one package???

Wow

[un4given]

Painhope, my view of reasonable and your view of reasonable might be different.

I must say, I am floored. If RedHat's view of reasonable differs from its customer's view of reasonable (which it obviously does), then this is going to be a disaster.

As a consultant and long time RedHat user who has brought RedHat into many companies with no Linux presence, I can no longer recommend them. RedHat's primary advantage was its low cost for a fully supported product. Now, that advantage no longer exists.

Sad too, because RedHat was really starting to gain some brand recognition. Now, it's going to be known as the Linux that's too expensive to use.

Re:Wow

[Jason Earl]

Are you kidding? painehope wanted RedHat to support a 4000 CPU cluster for the price of a few lousy RedHat Linux boxed sets. That's just insane.

RedHat's support is still far less expensive than any commercial competitor. With Windows support is also separate from licensing. The difference is tha t with RedHat licensing itself is free.

If you want you can switch to SuSE (pretty much the only other Linux choice that is supported by a commercial company), but don't expect to pay any less for actual support (not to mention the fact that YaST2 is not Free Software).

Personally, I use Debian, as I am not interested in commercial support, but I can't blame RedHat for trying to get a fair price for their support. Engineers don't come cheap.

Re:Wow

[clacour]

Are you kidding? painehope wanted RedHat to support a 4000 CPU cluster for the price of a few lousy RedHat Linux boxed sets. That's just insane.

I think you misread what painehope said. He did not say he wanted it for $50 for 512 servers -- he wanted it for $50 each for 512 servers, $25,600 total. (And $35,840 for the 1024-node example.)

Since almost every server in the cluster is identical (by design), this is going to be about as hard for Red Hat to support as one box. (They will strongly tend to all have exactly the same problems.) In a few cases, you're going to have issues between boxes, and a few boxes will be different from all the rest (admin server, control point, managing node, that kind of stuff.)

I would assume they have a small test cluster (8-10 boxes) for working out bugs, especially the between-systems types. When the problem is solved, you install exactly the same thing on all 512 (or 1024, or 18 gazillion) machines.

He was even willing (even eager) to provide a caching RHN server (or perhaps he meant buy one, since RH does sell such a beast.)

So from Red Hat's perspective, this is going to be like supporting 10 or 15 different boxes (and I'm being pessimistic -- the equivalent of 4 or 5 is probably closer) and the RHN bandwith of ONE, for $25,600. That's actually a pretty sweet deal for Red Hat.

Painehope's problem is that Red Hat isn't interested in this. They say he should pay them $179,200 for 512 nodes. (Or $358,400 for 1024.)

The upshot of this is almost certainly going to be that people using the really big clusters (all the ones that make the "New supercomuter record!" headlines) are NOT going to be Red Hat.

Re:Wow

[painehope]

painehope wanted RedHat to support a 4000 CPU cluster for the price of a few lousy RedHat Linux boxed sets

RTFQ ( Read The Fine Question ). I didn't say that I wanted that at all, and I even proposed a sliding scale for large numbers of machines. And the last time I talked to Redhat regarding clusters, they wanted to license them the same as desktop workstations, which is outrageous. The hypothetical situations posed by others, who brought up nightmare customers ( like the one who said that a customer might want a team of RHCE's out to install a 5000 node network ) is handled by licensing terms. Who'd have fucking thunk it?

All what I would want out of an official support contract would be a direct update line ( so that I could have a caching update server on my network, which my machines would hit ) and a per-incident support rate. This is mostly me wanting them to get something more than a boxed-set compensation for the excellent work they have done, since updates I've already automated on my site, and bugs myself and the rest of my team track down.

What I don't like about Opensource.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Redhat wants us to develop and test fedora for free, turn around sell it to enteprise for big bucks. That is obvious, not redundant you crazy moderators. What I'm trying to get at is, that I don't see this as a good thing, but it must be the model for development if OSS is to thrive. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to develop for free. Linus took quite a gamble that sorta paid off for him( not big, but he will always have plenty of job oppertunites).

What about a model where OSS developers get paid for the quality of code they check in? I guess that would be freelancing,which we would still get the stick in terms of benifits ect. But, that would be better than the current state of affairs. I bet a company that set up a simular structure could do well if it didn't burn up its cash first. On second thought, the GPL would allow any competitor to just take the source the company just paid for. It would have to be an industry wide thing. I'm sure there are many other flaws that other posters will point out. Well, have at it.

Camera ?

[phoxix]

For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.

I guess he has yet to try SuperMount

Sunny Dubey

Re:Camera ?

[NineNine]

So downloading and compiling an additional program to try to get accessories to work properly isn't "sub-par"? In this day and age, if I plug a standard device into my PC, and it doesn't work right away, that's sub-par. It would be back at the store *long* before I tried to download some kind of intermediary program. In my mind, that's totally unacceptable.

Licensing, support and updates: Debian

[debrain]

It seems like the three main issues that I identified are:
Licensing, particularly for educational institutions,
Support, especially for the soon-deprecated RH9 series, and
Updates, and the continuation of the up2date network.

Many of the users of Red Hat seem understandably confused and upset about the direction that the company is taking. I would like to, humbly, suggest that none of these issues are pertinent to the Debian distribution. I would personally encourage users in a situation where they feel tramelled to do some research in this respect.

I think it would be inappropriate, in the context of posting to this interview, for me to suggest Debian as an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise edition. However, I do believe it to be a substantial alternative to the soon defunct consumer Red Hat series. In time, Fedora may also be a valid alternative, but at the moment its capacity to act as a valuable, low risk distribution has not been substantiated.

Still don't know the answer...

[edubarr]

The questions were good, but I think that something is missing...

What about stable releases for fedora?? Since it's gonna be the "bleeding-edge" will it ever be a clear distinction between stable and development? Will the security bugs be worked out and patches made available or will people need to upgrade all the time?

I'm not a red hat or fedora user (long live slack!) but I've got some friends that barelly know their way around RHL. Putting something full of holes in their hands will only frustrate them. Well, I guess I'll have to talk them into something like Mandrake or Debian.

Redhat doesn't sell licences?

[wackybrit]

Okay, perhaps someone here can fill me in. I'm not too au fait with the business models used by these companies, and just stick to my pet distros.. but he said this:

Keep in mind that we do not sell licenses. We sell subscriptions where the value of the bits are integrated with service levels.

This sounds fair, considering Redhat is just a bundle of open source software, with a few pieces of free, but closed source, technology.

But does this mean I could legally get a copy of RedHat Enterprise Server, and install it on as many machines as I want? That is, I don't pay for any support or ongoing upgrades, but I get the benefit of the new Redhat product. Then, for support and upgrades, there's always the community.. or, as I'm sure will happen, a 'free' community effort to keep RES patched against the major problems will spring up.

Re:Redhat doesn't sell licences?

[clacour]

Keep in mind that we do not sell licenses. We sell subscriptions where the value of the bits are integrated with service levels.

Then somebody at Red Hat is lying. My account rep (who I'll be nice and not name for now)told me yesterday, when discussing this exact subject, that we WERE buying (well, renting) a license, and that we most emphatically could NOT install it on multiple machines. (Which is 180 degrees from what a different account exec told me 6 months ago.)

This is the major gripe I have with the new scheme. If I want to put Linux on an unimportant box (say, an X station for the operators), or a temporary box, I must pay Red Hat $350 (absolute minimum) AND I must wait a week to ten days for them to process my order and send me the boxed set. (That statement is per the aforementioned account rep.)

Here's the way I'd like it to work:

You could install it as many times as desired, but get no support at all (not even RHN) for free

For a reasonable price (say $100), you get RHN only -- no support at all.

THEN get to the $350 if you actually want any kind of support

What we've got (per the account exec I mentioned) is item #3 as a option, and ONLY number 3.

Re:APT?

[bogie]

He answered that in the first question.

"Users continuing with RHL9 past the end of its maintenance window will be interested in the Fedora Legacy Project, a community-driven continuation of updates for RHL9 and RHL7.3."

Based on the talent involved with the Fedora project I see no reason as to why updates won't work well and in a timely manner. To doubt that is to cast doubt on every single other community Linux project such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo et al. Ther are a lot of users in your particular situation. Nobody has a desire to make things more confusing. I'm absolutely positive that by the time official support ends next year that a great replacement will be up and running for the countless Red Hat users out there. Red Hat 7.x through 9 is likely to be supported for years to come. So no, hopefully tarballs won't be in your future.

I'm downloading Debian right NOW

[AwesomeJT]

What can I say.... I loved RedHat but then RH said go take a flying leap! Basically, Fedora is the same as Debian, but Deb as been around for years and successfully community driven. RH keeps changing their tune every so often. I paid for RHN and now I get robbed of my money -- upgrade offer isn't good enough for me. I honestly don't think WS or ES will be around -- eventually they will also be EOLed which forces everyone to pay $$$ for AS. Why shoot a profitable business? Even if it doesn't greatly grow your business -- at least you have name recognition -- other distributions would do ANYTHING to have the RH name recongition. You can't buy Good Will!

Answers, paraphrased

[pjrc]

I wasn't very impressed. Maybe I'm just bitter about having to migrate from RH9 to "something else"... which will probably be Debian rather than Fedora (due to Fedora's very short maintainance schedule).

Here's roughly how I read his answers:

1) Your fully paid RHN subscriptions for RH9 will be worthless. You can't have a refund, but you can pay even more for a (discounted but not complementary) upgrade to the enterprise version, to keep using your already-paid RHN entitlements. And yes, we can almost admit the SSL problem that broke RHN was our fault, but rather than appologizing, it was actually due to our excellent security policy.

2) No actual recommendation for small business. Dodge the question by babbling about what a small business is, and something about "Differentiated services skills" during the transition from proprietary to open source deployment. Yeah, sure Roblimo, that's not PR speak! I've got a nice bridge for sale too. Wanna meet in Brooklin to see it?

3) Slashdot readers should be content with Fedora, but everyone who works for a living should pay for various versions of Redhat Enterprise Linux. Non-technical home users should use Microsoft.

4) Redhat decided only to focus on enterprise. Hint that WS is meant to be a client, but ultimately dodge question about advantage of offering "full package" including both desktop and client.

5) Redhat has never made a mistake, even in the dot-com days.

6) Promise to stay with GPL and collaborate with open source community.

7) Hardware support won't come until a large user base demands it. Fedora is supposed to build that user base. Dodge the question about discontinuance of RH9 affecting growth of hardware demand.

8) Shrink wrapped product didn't make enough money and couldn't grow (but no admission it was unprofitable, despite the well-known fact that Redhat was always in the red all those years).

9) Matt user linux and gnome at home.

10) Call us regarding your educational discount... because we won't say anything specific in public.

Have you tried Mandrake?

[Idou]

I think you RH desktop users should take a look at Mandrake. Not only is it rpm based, but most of its revenue comes from the a club of desktop users so you don't have to worry about them dumping you for servers (there are currently 18,500 club members).

There also is a wide variety of support options.

As far as financial stability, I am pretty sure that their next financial statements will show profitability (they were very close 6 months ago).

Oh yeah, and it is MUCH easier to install and maintain then RH (imho).

Answers less than clear? Questions poor?

[theolein]

I don't know if it's only me but I found his answers to the less than good questions poor. Apart from the questions about up2date and the educational issues (10a/b/c) , I found one big question missing that had been modded up to 5, and that is the question about what will happen to RedHat's image due to leaving the non commercial space.

Many people were wondering why RedHat did this, since the non commercial space is where most people got to know RH in the first place. My personal reaction to this is that I went out and bought a Mandrake subscription, as I felt that RH had sort of "betrayed" it's most loyal users. I see no real difference between Fedora and Gentoo and I felt that the one company left supporting non commercial users, Mandrake, was worth supporting. I see an image problem for RH in gaining new geek advocacy in future. It remains to be seen what becomes of SuSE's non commercial efforts.

As for the questions about educational institutions, I found his answers very poor. Why did painhope have to wait this long to get a reply? Why were RedHat sales teams so ignorant of educational pricing from Microsoft that they neglected customers like this, until it got posted on /. for the world to see?

To me, It sounds like RH has a very disconnected view of some important issues in the real world. Number one is lack of perception from customers' point of view and number two is an incredible lack of perspective and proactive action on RH's part: If the desktop was profitable, and considering the fact that this was RH's public image, then why not keep it for simple reasons of good PR. If there are so many driver issues (web cams, digital cameras etc) then why on earth didn't RH simply approach some companies in order to get a Linux effort started with those companies? The way he says it, it sounds as if he's simply too bloody lazy and disinterested in actually listening to customers.

RH8 Default Worked Great w/ my Camera

[stevesliva]

Sony DSC-P72 and gphoto... just needed to switch to PTP mode.

I actually prefer gphoto to the cruddy windows software than came with the camera... if you want to do anything more than automagically dump everything on the Memory Stick into My Documents, you've got to access the flash memory manually anyhow. Plus that automagical program dumps an icon in the system tray at startup... talk about crap.

And you know what? RH8 doesn't bitch at me when I turn the camera off like Win2K on my laptop does-- supposed to click the remove hardware icon first. This is plug and play?

I though I'd need dual-boot on my desktop with XP to use stuff like my camera and the cable modem successfully without a big headache, but I haven't booted XP since the Adelphia guy came to verify my MAC address and install some spyware on my XP partition. The bastards block port 80, but Apache's working just fine on the 32K other ports.

Re:RH8 Default Worked Great w/ my Camera

[cmacb]

When I plug my Olympus camera into the USB port it shows up as a disk drive. I just drag the pictures wherever I want and can use the thumbnails generated by Konqueror or Nautilus to reject the duds. I've never had to use Gphoto at all.

Seems to me that not only should digital cameras avoid specialized software for Windows, but they can avoid the need for specialized software in Linux as well. Scanners or Webcam devices probably need something special in that area, but cameras that just take pictures to be uploaded or music devices that hold MP3s etc should just look like a drive.

Average ha!

[IceFox]

For the 'average' reader of Slashdot, the Fedora Project is the ideal Linux distribution.

The average slashdot reader runs windows and is a little technical. They need something that can work long term to play with when they want. They don't want something they have to upgrade every three months!!! I know enough to install Debian which is the hard part. The rest is easy. It just runs and is easy to update over a _long_ period of time without fuss. I have been running stable on some of my boxes for a number of years. I am not a kernel hacker, I enjoy just playing around in Linux and don't care having to get everything up and working every three months! Back when I ran windows I reloaded it every one-three months and I remember just how much of a pain in the ass it was, so much so that I tried Linux out... Especially when you make it painfully clear that Fedora is nothing more then a beta test for the enterprise beta/release don't fill me with happy thoughts of productivity. And the idea of having multiple rpm repositories gives me the willies. In the debian world most of the package are in one place (or heading to it). Because of that they can be made sure to be compatiable and well intigrated (or hell get this... just work!) This is a good thing. What happens when repository #8 in on your box just goes off line because the guy that was hosting it moved? I tried out the apt-rpm and found myself having to spend quite a lot of extra time updating because the servers were always busy. I have never gotten a busy reply from the debian repositories. Again they just are there and work. Just wait till the first time someone updates a Fedora box and repository 1 has kernel 2.6 and repostitory has kernel 2.4 and you grab parts from each and then turn on your computer the next morning. NO THANKS! You average slashdot user wants somthing that just works and continues to work, they don't care to re-install every three months or have to worry about which pagages work with what other packages.

-Benjamin Meyer

Common GPL misunderstanding

[Hanul]

The GPL states, that everybody can sell software under the GPL, but he has to provide the source code, if his customer asks for it. And, of course, the customer has the right to re-distribute the software (again under the GPL). You don't have any rights to get binaries or ISO images, if you aren't a customer. Red Hat is so kind to let you download the whole enterprise distro as source RPMs, but in GPL terms they only have to do this for their customers.

The real cost of updates and fixes.

[jbn-o]

I've been informally tracking conversation threads about Fedora Core. It seems to me that a lot of people are dancing around the question of how much security and bugfix updates are really worth. Apparently many people rely on Red Hat's security and bugfixes to where they will be missed if absent. But at the same time, people don't value them enough to pay (virtually anyone) for them, hence they would rather switch distributions than pay for the software improvements they've come to rely on.

Perhaps this is the watershed event that makes people aware of what a service economy looks like when people have to deal with something close to honest pricing--the end of getting Red Hat's widely-appreciated labor at no charge.

Re:What I don't like about Opensource.

[geomon]

Redhat wants us to develop and test fedora for free, turn around sell it to enteprise for big bucks

While they paid their developers a regular salary, Microsoft was constantly testing their product on their client dime. I paid for several versions of DOS only to find that bugs were undocumented (actually, they denied they even existed). Yet when the bugs were eventually fixed in the next release, I had to pay full price AGAIN to get the benefit.

If you are having difficulty making a living on OSS, then I am only going to point to one example where individuals can make a thriving business off of other developers efforts: become the next Microsoft. They have incorporated and then licensed software from BSD developers without paying one red cent.

Great way to run a software business, isn't it?

Now that my sarcasm has worn off, you will probably find more than one person here who might have a more practical method of generating revenue from OSS.

Yeah Right

[_UnderTow_]

"One clue is that they are not in perfect English, as interview responses or articles that are 'laundered' by PR or media relations departments almost always are"

And how would the editors at slashdot know what perfect english looks like?

i beg to differ

[apachetoolbox]

Because like it or not Exchange and SQL2000...

oracle > SQL2000

Soon Novell Groupwise will be 100% on linux, which is better if not equal to Exchange.

Good summary, my take also

[Spinality]

Very well summarized.

It's all a bit disappointing. If I were a RedHat executive, I hope I'd perceive that the corporation's greatest intangible asset has been a large, loyal user base that has served as the first line of the sales/delivery/support process. This new plan has basically dumped that asset, in one swell foop. Do they know what they're giving up?

This situation has reminded me of another dubious business choice; this is a long analogy but is perhaps worth repeating. Long ago, I was a developer at Sears, Roebuck, when the company went through an interesting business-wide change. They decided to get rid of nearly all their seasoned full-time store employees, and to replace them with part-time, low-cost, low-benefits employees. This was back in the 70's when Sears was going strong. It seemed like a good business/economic decision on paper; but it overlooked that fact that, more than anything else, the thing that had given Sears the edge for years was its base of fanatically loyal, experienced, skilled personnel. (Suppliers HATED dealing with Sears because they couldn't schmooze or bribe their way around quality or price issues.) In the course of a couple of years, Sears replaced that strong workforce, by creating what today we'd call McJobs. The few full-timers left were bitter and resentful. (Wallmart eventually reaped the benefit of the Sears restructuring, by doing the same thing on a grander scale.)

Like the Sears decision, the RedHat choice may in fact be the correct strategic choice. From the outside, without all the facts, it's hard to know. But each of these decisions seems to discount what, on the surface, seems to represent a core asset. I hope RedHat is taking its decision very seriously.

So much for the RHCE

[Wokan]

I guess I can stop studying for my RHCE. I'll be concentrating on the cross-distro certifications instead.

One of the things that attracted me to the idea of becomming a RHCE was that I could use my home LAN to experiment with the concepts presented in my book and observe changes in each new version of Red Hat as it came out.

Somehow, I don't think the idea of a FCE (Federoa Certified Engineer) is going to catch on.

At my future interview: "No, sir. I haven't had any experience with the latest Red Hat ES, but I've used Fedora for years."

Of my 7 systems, 2 had been converted to Red Hat for my studies. I'm thinking I'll swap them over to other distros now. I've got Mandrake on 3 already, so perhaps a Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware.

I seem to remember owing Gentoo some updates on a shell script I wrote...

Academic Pricing :: goodbye redhat

[bloosqr]

After seeing that non-response to the academic pricing, I was annoyed enough to call redhat up to see what is going on. They have not finalized the pricing but it is going to be $25->$30 a year per machine w/ some minumum number of machines. They also will offer a "proxy server" for $2500 so you can roll your own updates.

(1) The proxy server idea is stupid since apt is ported over to redhat. If we know how to setup a ftp server we automagically get a "proxy" server. Unless they are not going to let us grab the updated rpms (from
our $25 per node licensed "up2dates") and copy it to the server which if they dont as far as I can tell violates the gpl (unless they do an "endrun" by providing rpm's w/ "trademarked" pictures in it).

(2) $25 a machine/year is more expensive than windows for updates! Yes redhat is a smaller company BUT at microsoft is writing their own gui, writing their own kernel, writing their own patches,
writing their own driver specs. Redhat is NOT doing these things on their own (but to be fair they are contributing but having per machine licensing is a trick worthy of SCO not a linux company).

(3) We are in a physics dept and run "oscared" images for a smallish beowulf cluster (50 dual nodes) and have two more beowulf clusters and one public access workstation cluster in our department alone. It makes *no* sense to pay $25 a node for this since we "automirror" when things go awry. I personally will move over to debian (or wait and see what fermilabs etc is going to do). This redhat fiasco is a fiasco. Using "trademarked" pictures to do an endrun around the gpl to get "per processor" licensing is an end run around the GPL and ought to be treated as such. (This is, as far as I can tell, what they are doing w/ "enterprise" redhat to prevent me from buying one "enterprise" redhat and apt-proxying my other nodes). Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.

best regards,
-bloo

Re:Sloppy editing on questions 10a/b/c?

[Jokkey]

That last paragraph in question 10b looks to me like it was supposed to be Szulik's response to 10a and 10b. If so, then it seems to me that that's a decent job of addressing the issue and a decent attempt to accomodate educational facilities. The wording of the paragraph ("will begin to address a void") implies to me that RedHat is working on doing more to accommodate educational facilities.

Is it really so bad that Szulik asked painehope to send him an email? It seems that I've seen a number of companies that require you to talk to a salesperson to get a quote...

Selling out

[demachina]

I've gone out of my way over the years to buy Red Hat box sets and up2date subscriptions. I wanted to give money to Red Hat because they were pretty cool in the early days when they seemed to have a long view and had what it would take to make Linux successful. After recent events and reading Matthew's BS I'm afraid I made a mistake. For what ever reason the executives at Red Hat have mutated in to the same kind of slimeballs that populate companies the world over and they certanily don't "get it" anymore. Its a really great idea to dump your flagship producton, and customers, on the backs of a bunch of unpaid volunteers, while you try to cash in on the peices you can charge an arm and a leg for. Red Hat's strategy of making a product based on free labor worked when they were making an affordable and convenient package. Now that they are orphaning a big segment of their loyal customer base and still leveraging free labor but are now charging rates rivaling Microsoft's and are starting to look just as slimy and unappealing. It was a really great idea to sign a bunch of people for up2date and then immediately kick the chair out from under it leaving paying customers hanging.

I imagine this can be attributed to the disease that inflicts every company after it goes public. They stop prioritizing making good products and cultivating happy customers who in turn give them money with joy in their hearts because they like the product.

Instead, like most public companies, the only people they start caring about are the analysts sitting in Wall Street and the one and only priority is making the revenue projections each quarter so the stock price goes up and they get rich when they cash in the options. Just being profitable isn't good enough either. MUST GROW FAST AND CONSTANTLY whether its sound business or not. Customers, rather than being the top priority, turn in to a necessary evil who must be constantly milk for cash and they must be constantly manipulated.

Priority #1, must get customers to sign up for subscriptions. Just selling good software is too unpredictable. If we screw the pooch and a new release sucks people don't buy it, we miss our numbers and Wall Street is unhappy. If we make customers pay us a constant amount of money each year then we ALWAYS make our numbers even if our product sucks sometimes.

Priority #2, a key component of subscriptions is support. But damnit support is expensive. Must cut support costs. Lets hire a bunch of people in India who are dirt cheap. Nothing wrong with that if they actually know what they are doing. The problem is they are usually hired iike cattle and handed a bunch of preprinted FAQ's. As long as the customers question is precisely answered on the FAQ service is great, unfortunately the FAQ's only work half the time and the rest of the time your support staff exercises their one true skill, using the buttons on their phone to constantly forward or put on hold anyone who has an actual problem until they eventually give up and hang up.

Priority #3, make sure all your competitors are also publicly traded and also implement Priority #1 and #2 so they suck just as bad as you do so customers are left choosing between the lesser evils and will pay you even though your company's products have started to suck. Thats what competition is all about. Everybody competes to be equally shitty.

After some consideration I've deduced that Capitalism was an interesting experiment but its reached the point its flaws are starting to far outweigh its benefits. Fact is its become 100% about overpaid and unscrupulous execs striving to make as much money as possible as easily as possible. Screwing labor and customers is job 1. Those with ethics and interested in producing a good product at a fair price need not apply. All of Capitalism's competitors have also proven to suck so maybe we should go back to the drawing board and try to come up with a economic system where people are actually rewarded based on the merit of their work.

Debian install

[runlvl0]

"Debian still has that horrible installer which makes vi commands seem intuitive"

I was in the same boat with respect to Red Hat; Debian has turned into my favorite post-RH Linux largely on the basis of ease of installation.

Download a Knoppix .iso, make CD

Boot system with Knoppix CD

Open console, type

sudo knoppix-install

Follow curses-based menus to create partitions and select bootloader. Reboot.
No packages to select, no painful Debian installer, just an easy desktop Debian installation in about 15 minutes (total install, depnding on RAM and CDROM speed). For more fun, after installation, a quick

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

brings you up2date with the latest packages - you'll never even miss the Red Hat Network, I promise. (For graphical management, apt-get install synaptic. So simple, even a recovering MCSE can do it!) :^)

P.S. - "...which makes vi commands seem intuitive"? Why, vi is intuitive! In my day, we had ed and we liked it! We typed uphill, both ways in the snow...

Sometimes it is annoying...

[X-Nc]

to be part of the Open Source community. The amount of bitching, whining and moaning about the RH/Fedora move is an embaresment to everyone in it. I have been using RH since 2.1 and Linux, in general, since November of 1991. I'm not some kernel hacker guru, just a techie doing network/sysadmin/development stuff. Personally I think that the direction that RH is going is a good one. It could have been done in a better, more gentle way, though. But the bottom line is this...

There is nothing phylisofically or morraly wrong with the move RH is making. If the change does not fit your needs, for whatever reasons, there are more than enough alternative distros (and even the *BSDs and other OSs) to choose from. Why does everything have to devolve into a holey war? Why do people have to get so personal about a tool? This is like throwing a fit over, for example, a hammer. Comopany A makes hammers. You've been using their hammers for years. They decide to change their hammers size, weight and price and this change makes it unusable for your needs. Do you cry and bitch and act stupid about it? No, you go buy a hammer from company B. End of story.

My suggestion to all the people posting flames and toll bait in here is to get off your high horses, shut the hell up and do something useful.

(Yes, I know this isn't much better than a flame either but I'm really getting tired of all these people going on and on about how bad RH is when they're doing more to further the use of Linux and open source than all of these ranting people combined)

Mod down

[bogie]

As everyone else pointed out nobody is forcing you to use Fedora. And if you do, nobody if forcing you to report bugs. So what's the problem again? Oh I get it. Red Hat is giving away a free distro for anyone to use as they see fit, but that's not enough for you. You want to be paid for using it. Sorry, not gonna happen.

According to your logic everyone who reports bugs for ANY distro deserves to be paid for it, or else they are "just working for free".

"I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to develop for free"

Are you new to this whole Free Software thing? Because it sounds like it. If your into the "pay me for my work or screw off" thing you'd be better off sticking to proprietary commercial software. And if you going to develop OSS then it better be Dam good. Because if it isn't your sure not going to make any money on it.

Re:What I don't like about Opensource.

[irix]

Redhat wants us to develop and test fedora for free, turn around sell it to enteprise for big bucks.

RedHat gives you Fedora for free. They sink lots of resources into working on Fedora, not to mention bandwidth for hosting, mailing lists, etc. If you want you can help by creating packages or filing bug reports. How exactly is this a bad thing?

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to develop for free.

Then don't. Nobody is asking you to do anything. Many of us write open-source software on our spare time because we have an itch to scratch or we want to give something back. Other people write docs, file bugs reports and do packaging for the same reasons.

What about a model where OSS developers get paid for the quality of code they check in? ... that would be better than the current state of affairs.

WTF? It would be better than the current state of affairs? I'll give you a clue: there is nothing wrong with the current state of affairs. People are paid to work full time on Open-Source software by companies selling support for it. Other people do it on a volonteer basis for free. What is the problem here exactly?

White Box Linux: RHAS w/o the trademarked graphics

[JMarsden]

There are several efforts under way to build and create installable freely-redistributable ISOs from the RHEL 3 SRPMs.

Note also that RH does make SRPMs of updates to RHEL freely available for download. So such a distribution can benefit from RH's updates/patches/security fixes.

One of these I have here is "White Box Linux". Its web page specifically asks that it not be linked to from /., and I'll comply with that request. Use Google to find it, if you really do want to get a copy (via BitTorrent) of its RC1 ISOs. There is also a mini-HOWTO on rebuilding RHEL at http://www.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhel -rebuild.htm and an associated mailing list at http://www.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhel -rebuild-l.html.

For some ex-RH users, this kind of "unsupported forked varient from RHEL3" may be a better choice than Fedora, without paying $$$ for official RHEL.

Jonathan

And FYI

[pr0ntab]

there is nothing stopping you from running rpmbuild on all of those and starting up your own repository.

You just can't claim it's RHEL. Even if the resulting bundled ISOs had the exact same MD5sums. (I wouldn't do that purposefully anyway, not a good idea).

You could call yourself "Beanie-Cap Enterprise Distribution" or something.

Execs don't use unix

[superpulpsicle]

This is a fact. I know of someone closely enough who had at one time business ties to some high execs in sun microsystem. These execs swear by solaris on the job, but they are on their windows PC/laptop asap when they get home. No this is not a stereotype based on one exec either.

When Mr. redhat CEO here claims he has a 5 node linux cluster at home... it's a joke. You know this guy has already accepted $$$ from Mr. gates in a short conspiracy to take down redhat.

Execs in general like golf, lots of vacation days, unnecessary business trips, ludicrous bonuses and M$ windows. They are all the same. Nicely done, answer all the easy questions.