Slashdot Mirror
Interview with Red Hat VP Michael Tiemann
david_ross writes "An interview with Red Hat's Vice President Michael Tiemann has just been posted on LinuxQuestions.org. His responses in the interview show that RedHat's community product, Fedora, has a bright future: "The project has been incredibly successful, and we have a lot of people outside of Red Hat to thank for that. What Red Hat must now do is to finish the job of making Fedora a true community project by publishing, and getting accepted, a governance model". "
I still say it was a mistake to kill off RHL. It made the name "Red Hat" synonymous with Linux, at least to the casual observer. And people like to stick with what they know.
Michael Tiemann recently took some time to do an email interview with LinuxQuestions.org (Thanks Michael!). As you can probably tell from some of the questions, this interview is a touch old. If you have a question that you'd like answered, post it in this thread. I'll send a few of the best questions, as followups, to Michael.
LQ) Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from, where did you go to school and the other basics.
MT) When most people ask this question, they mean "where did you get your degree?" I got my BS CSE from the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania. That's the final resting place for several chunks of the first all-digital computer, the ENIAC. But I started learning about computers at home, about 1974, when my father bought and assembled an IMSAI 8080, then later a Cromemco Z2-D with three or four 64KB banks of RAM and a 10MB winchester hard disk. As I recall, the Z2-D computer cost as much as our station wagon. And that's when I started to learn BASIC, PL/I, Pascal, C, FORTH, LISP, and many other programming languages. It was a passion of mine since I was 12 to write a compiler, and after writing a few toy compilers in CS class, I got my chance in 1987 to transform the GNU C Compiler into the GNU C++ compiler, and later, to merge it as part of the GNU Compiler Collection.
Believe it or not, the Z2-D from 1976 was my PC in college (1982-1986). With my summer job at Cromemco, I'd upgraded it with parts from the scrap heap: a 68020 processor, 1.5 MB of RAM (3 512KB modules), a 48KB two-port graphics card. I also bought a shiny new 50MB harddisk which consumed my entire summer earnings.
LQ) What's the hostname of your favorite linux box and why is it named that? Also, if you couldn't use Red Hat or Fedora, which distribution would you use?
MT) I haven't paid attention to hostnames in forever, but if I were not using Red Hat or Fedora, I'd probably use Mandrake. Mandrake seems to have a very large number of RPMs available for it.
LQ) What was your first introduction to Linux? What was the reason behind you using Linux and was anyone in particular responsible for turning you on to Linux?
MT) My first introduction was via Adam Richter, creator of the Yggdrasil distribution. He called me up and took me to lunch one day, mainly to try to understand whether what I'd learned at Cygnus (the world's first company to commercialize free software) could be applied to the business he was thinking about starting. I didn't think so: we were selling support contracts for $35,000 to more than $1M per year, and he wanted to sell CDs for $99 (or perhaps even less). The two models could not have been more different.
I forgot about Linux until I got a call from Larry McVoy, telling me that there was this software company in North Carolina (software company in North Carolina!?) that had about 15 people and was growing by leaps and bounds. It was committed to free software, and Cygnus should look at acquiring it. While I was not that excited about Yggdrasil, I did become excited about Red Hat. We held a board meeting to discuss spending 10% of our equity in 1995 to acquire Red Hat but I could not convince the two other co-founders to make an offer. Four years later, Red Hat acquired Cygnus with 10% of their equity. Sigh.
LQ) I remember reading an interview with you in late 2000 in which you answered the question "Which distribution do you feel is your main competitor?" with "Right now our main competitors are Sun Solaris and Microsoft." Fast forward to today, do you think that same answer still applies?
MT) Moreso than ever.
LQ) Now that the dust from the initial Fedora announcement has settled and FC has a couple releases under its belt, would you say the project is as successful as Red Hat had hoped? In what areas would you say it really shines and what do you think are its biggest shortcomings?
MT) The project has been incredibly successful, and we have a lot of people outside of Red Hat to thank for that. What Red Hat must now do is to f
-Teiresias
I remember when the stock shot up... "This can make money?" some people thought. The answer to what RH is going to do now is actually in yesterday's news item about making money on this sort of thing...
:P
I remember trying to download Fedora...hahaha that took forever.
I remember wanting to try it out...I guess I will now that I have a work-issued laptop that's better than my personal one. Time to play with Fedora on my Inspiron 8600!
Red Hat just announced the purchase of the Netscape Directory Server and Certificate Management System from AOL, which seems to be a slight departure from the usual business plan.
What I don't get is if Red Hat acquired Netscape Directory Service why are they still claiming to be focusing on the "desktop" when Novell's NDS is Linux-friendly. Is it mostly because of the proprietary nature of NDS? I just hope there isn't too much duplication of effort with the directory services biz.
"I haven't paid attention to hostnames in forever"
Anyone else think that sounds so goddamned arrogant? Sorry, but most of us take some pride and laugh about our naming schemes - movies, books, musicians, etc. It sounds like he's condescending to anyone who might be entertained by their hostname.
Frankly, I thought it was an interesting and unique question and would've liked to know the answer.
FYI - my home systems are named "SURESHOT," "ROOTDOWN," "BRASSMONKEY," and "REVERE" and the router was named "BEASTIE" (it was originally running... Get it? I always thought that was kinda cool.
1) Fedora is a good distro, if you want the newest staff it will never be rock-solid, try for instance the debian-unstable, or Gentoo when it has a bad day
2) RHEL is something important - RH needs money to support itself. A good UNIX operating system (like Linux cannot be cheap). Also people from management want to pay because:
- they think if something is free cannot be good
- they think that you should have someone you can blame
3) RH didn't steal the Linux - it is free, what you have to pay for are two things: trademark and support - if you can support yourself and don't care about trademarks but have to use software that needs RHEL try a RHEL clone. On the other hand if you have enough money to afford such software (think Oracle) why not give some to the Linux community.
But it's only my 0.02 Euro...
You can defy gravity... for a short time
Our organization even has a Redhat site license that drops the cost down to $30 a desktop per year, but after they decided to effectively drop support for the millions of redhat 8 and 9 installations, I have no interest in dealing with a company that can make such a profound shift without considering the needs of their existing customers. Yes, we did pay for Redhat support! Suse looks like its moving in the opposite direction of redhat so that might be an option for a good option down the road.
(Although I don't have that much code of my own that I could add, I track oodles of excellent software and would be more than happy to roll up the necessary files to convert these to RPMs/SRPMs.)
Mind you, other projects aren't much better. A lot of Gentoo packages are old and you have to reach some unspecified level of standing in the Gentoo community before they'll ask you if you want to contribute. I happen to like compiling my own software, but I've started souring on Gentoo as a way to do it. Rolling my own binaries is only useful if I've got recent enough software to make it useful.
As it stands, for me, the score is definitely: Gentoo, Fedora 3.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The submitter wrote that Tiemann's responses in the interview show that RedHat's [sic] community product, Fedora, has a bright future. That's not quite right. They "show" rather that Tiemann believes that Fedora has a bright future, which is quite a different statement. That is, just because Mr. Tiemann makes a statement, it isn't ipso facto the case.
That said, Tiemann did a good job of representing Red Hat and highlighting what he thinks are Red Hat's noteworthy achievements.
Are you not allowed to say ANYTHING negative without being modded troll?
The Debian testing distribution already balances the leading edge with robustness very well. I don't think we need a new distribution to do it.
That and the public CVS server they've been promising for two years.
I should have been a little more clear, grown up support that is NOT hardware specific. Will HP support debian linux on Dell, IBM, whiteboxes, etc? When I pay for rhel i get hardware agnostic support from a name managers know, Debian needs a similar provider.
Who is a bigger loser? The guy who reads and responds to an article on Slashdot or the asshat who has to respond to tell him he's a loser? Fag.
Customers take me much more seriously when I tell them "I'm running Novell's Unix-like OS with Novell's implementation of .NET".
I am not critical of redhat for the practice pf charging for support. I'm critizing Redhat for dropping support on 2 very widely used products and not providing support for its freely downloadable product. (Fedora)
Although I wish RH lots of luck with Fedora I can't say that I'm interested in what they offer.
Their commercial offerings are a pain in the butt, the kernel they use is patched all over the place and they don't even offer support for normal Linux kernels. For all intents and purposes they are *not* a Linux distribution but a clever new way to achieve another vendor lock-in scenario.
My *proffessional* experience with their products have been nothing short of disappointing, all the advantages that Linux has, like flexibility and standardisation, RH has eliminated them one by one with their stringent support policies and nothing less then time consuming and awkward ways of keeping machines updated. They don't even guarantee API compatibility within major releases so I can't even update machines without testing the updates first. I don't want to start a "my distro is better than yours" argument but why would I go through all the aformentioned trouble when there a distro like Debian does guarentee API compatibility within major releases, can do security updates automatically without any worries, and is commercially supported by multiple companies as well? In every way I can think of it their commercial server products feel antiquated and awkward to administer.
IMNSHO The products RH sells have nothing in common with Linux and the reason why it got so popular in the first place.
A gratis version of RHEL would have all the downside of technology and engineering compromises with none of the benefit of long-term stability and supportability.
This was the one statement he made that sounded like Marketingspeak to me (even if he admitted their compromises). It doesn't have RH support, but Scientific Linux (and I assume White Hat and others) are exactly as stable and supportable as RHEL.
I'm wondering if they don't keem him awake at night.,..
Come on. It's not even troll tuesday. Get with the program people ! :-(.
Screw this place. I'm off to fark.com. At least the trolls there are creative... like slashdot *used* to be
Nah. Windows' installation process is about as hard as most Linuxes: easier than Gentoo or Debian, sure, but harder than SuSE. Do you honestly think most Windows users could successfully install Windows? I'd be really surprised if they could.
All's true that is mistrusted
There just aren't enough packages in it. It's just too damn small.
Check out FedoraTracker. This will let you search for add-on packages from well-known third-party repositories, including the semi-official Fedora Extras (which is, by the way, the maybe-not-obvious-but-definitely-workable way to submit RPMs.)
Let me rephrase, I'm not looking for free support for a downloadable product. I want pay support for a product that I can download, install, and run for free.
I would love to use Fedora on my desktop. It installs live a dream and looks very clean. But sometimes you just need more...
Open Source Sushi
Many of the missing software you have listed are specialized applications/services that many people wouldn't use.
I am in the same boat, i.e., I install many softwares that are for my own needs that most people wouldn't use. But I don't think Fedora should include them just to make a small number of people happier. At least they have lam for mpi, if that matters to you. I can always get the software I need and install them myself. Since they are already specialized enough, one should expect to spend time to install and test them, and help the open source effort in the process.
Fedora has enough critical software base already prepared to start building a specialized workstation AND server setup, unlike many other desktop-based distributions or embedded-based distributions. That is why I like Fedora (and previous RedHat) They have enough done for you that all you have to do is install extras that you need.
I don't mind having linux distribution companies focus on different applications and services. The market is already getting big enough.
Unfortunately, many software developers don't supply RPMs at all and those who do provide RPMs don't usually provide more than one and rarely even name the distribution involved. (NMap's RPMs are a good example.)
It's often hazardous to mix-n-match RPMs from different distribtions, because they don't use the same baseline for packages. eg: RedHat might use one version of glibc, SuSE another, Mandrake a third, PLD a fourth, etc.
I've tried forcing RPMs in the past, but that's usually made the box unusable after a while.
What would be good is if someone produced "supplements" to Fedora, such as "science, general", "astronomy", "parallel processing", etc. If there were some interest in something like this, I'd be willing to do it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This link to HP's Linux services is on a Microsoft ASP web server. Kinda ironic.
unless of course the mods are anal retentive or defensive whenever someone can read their altered state.
Open Source doesn't mean charity work or not-for-profit. It's a business model and they were offering customers support for a largely compatible product (RHEL3) that was planned to be supported for far longer than RHL8.0 and RHL9 would have been, even under the old lifetimes.
I was speaking about Red Hat, perhaps generally about Linux, and I always thought FreeBSD is not a distribution of Linux. But if I am wrong, please do correct me.
OTOH if you think that FreeBSD is _very_ stable, I guess you should have tried 5.3 before the release. There were some really serious bugs. As far as I know the SCHED_ULE still is not ready for production and we have to get on with the old SCHED_4BSD.
However, if you only wanted to say that if I cannot choose between different flavours of Linux I should take a look at FreeBSD - well that is not always that easy. I prefer to use FreeBSD where I can, but there are things Linux has and FreeBSD does not. For instance native Java 1.5.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
Redhat set up a meeting today with Michael, and it was very interesting.
He is currently touring Australia and SE Asia, he said he would be in Malaysia (KL I assume) on the weekend.
He was a very fluent speaker, and covered many of the points raised in the article, during our meeting.
We also asked him about GFS (something we are working on deploying) and he had some interesting comments on where its going.
He also was stong on making the point that newstuff/possibly unstable will be in Fedora, and when it all works it will be ported to RHE, he strongly encouraged us to submit stuff to Fedora, as a way to help steer the direction that RHE will take in the long term
He also stated that RHE 3 will be supported for 7 years from release, and new versions will be released every 18 months
All in all an interesting hour.
I'm a little late posting here, but I was just wondering how the security is on RHEL. Someone mentioned to me that it has gotten a lot better on security, but I haven't looked at anything from Red Hat in a while now. How is it compared to, say, Mac OSX, or OpenBSD?
...show me one place a "normal" person can buy a Linux machine like Dell, Gateway, or HP.
HP
Dell
The antique, hacked-up, unsupported version of OpenLDAP that Red Hat ships definitely sucks.
The current OpenLDAP offering is too difficult to set up and configure for anyone but serious computer scientists. But that was true of X-windows not too long ago... now it's nearly useable!
Saying OpenLDAP sucks is painting with too broad a brush. There are several extremely large implementations that perform extremely well and are rock-solid reliable; Stanford comes to mind.
Red Hat support is infinitely better than HP; I have large support agreements with RH, HP, IBM, MS, Sun, Avaya, and several other vendors. Red Hat and Microsoft easily outperform everyone else; MS because they will do pretty much anything for enough money, and RH because Red Hat Network makes routine patching and the like so incredibly simple.
IBM is OK (as long as you don't gore any of their sacred cows) and Avaya is bottom of the barrel because their support culture is fundamentally broken.