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". "

Comments

branding

[insensitive claude]

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.

Re:branding

[grub]

And people like to stick with what they know.

Exactly the reason Windows on the desktop is such an entrenched force. Just Saturday I was getting my hair cut. The woman said something about viruses her husband downloaded. "Oh, you're using Windows I guess." I said a bit bluntly. "Yeah, it's all we know and we can't afford a Mac." So right there that told me A) inertia will keep them using Windows until they die and B) many people think the Mac is the only alternative (and are too expensive)

Re:Redhat? No thanks!

[Anita Coney]

Wait a minute. You criticize Redhat for charging for support, but then you claim that "Debian really needs a 'grown up' large company to provide commercial support, that will quiet the fears of managers."

Am I missing something?!

Redhat/Fedora

[Mentorix]

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.

Re:Redhat/Fedora

[Pros_n_Cons]

Since you (and 30 others) feel its your duty to spit at redhat while holding up your Debian flag I think its about time you guys answer some questions. Red Hat did SMP, NPTL, clustering, O(1) scheduler, O(1) VM layer Starting and stopping 100,000 threads used to take 15 minutes, now it literally takes one second.
Had major contributions to or wrote outright Mozilla, Open Office, Kernel, GTK2, GCC, Glibc, metacity, wrote Java compiler, Xorg(xfree), stateless linux, SElinux, exec-shild, RPM, Anaconda. It bought out 3 company's turning previous closed source software the company's owned into OSS software like netscape directory and GFS, sistina's VM. RedHat promises to spend 1/5th of their income on R&D of free software.
Now... What has Debian done for us? Thanks for apt-get.
Which side is "just packaging free software" again?
Some of us BUY RH because they take our money and INVENT software that is OSS, they don't just patch security flaws.