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Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds
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.
Why, oh why must it be so?
Why is it so hard to have real user-friendliness in Linux?
The owls are not what they seem
Perhaps for Interview questions, the moderation system might be modified to remove the limit of +5?
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
I'm not amused. Clearly, Red Hat isn't doing enough to accommodate educational facilities with discounted volume licensing.
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
=-+
"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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Darl McBride, you have been scheduled for termination.
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.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
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.
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.
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.
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.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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.
/. for the world to see?
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
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.
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
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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.