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Interview with Red Hat VP Michael Tiemann

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

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". "

7 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Directory services by Gentoo+Fan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Directory services by illumin8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      The reason why is because a strong LDAP directory server is essential for a Samba PDC/BDC rollout if you're going to replace a Windows NT domain in the enterprise. This is a much needed piece to the enterprise desktop/server puzzle. I guess it's a little misleading to call it a "desktop focus" when what they really mean is that it's an enterprise Windows replacement focus.

      Believe me, I've been going through the hell that is replacing a Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux and it is just not easy. OpenLDAP is not scalable or reliable enough to be considered enterprise-ready yet, and Samba doesn't have enough support for 3rd-party LDAP servers (like iPlanet (Sun/Netscape) or IBM yet). Who wants to roll out Samba in the enterprise when you still need a Windows 2000 active directory DC or Windows NT 4 PDC to authenticate against? The whole point of Samba is to eliminate Microsoft's stranglehold on the marketplace, not to add to it.

      I've heard from a friend of mine at Redhat that the Samba team is so frustrated with OpenLDAP that they're thinking of writing their own LDAP backend to store all of the account information in.

      But trust me, once it's all working (it might be Samba 4 before then), single sign on using an LDAP server for the backend, and Samba PDC on the front-end will be the holy grail for end-users. Having the same password to authenticate against Windows, Linux/Unix, plus any web apps you might have is a good thing. Having a single place to manage your user identities is also a good thing.

      It amazes me to think of how many great technologies came out of Netscape and how quickly that company died... I mean think about it, they practically invented (I know they didn't really invent it, but they perfected it) the web browser, web server, directory server, certificate server, SSL, name switch service... You name it... Almost every core technlogy that the internet uses was built or perfected there. How much better off would the world be if Netscape had won the browser war?

      --
      "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
  2. I do agree with Tiemann by kompiluj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  3. Redhat? No thanks! by asv108 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I gave them up a few years ago, ever since they decided not provide support for freely downloadable ISO's. I went to debian for most of our servers, gentoo on my own desktops. We still have fedora dual booting on our intern desktops but I have no interest in giving redhat money for enterprise linux. Debian has turned out to be a great solution for us. I'm not saying its a redhat replacement, the fact is, Debian really needs a "grown up" large company to provide commercial support, that will quiet the fears of managers. Yes, I've seen the the Debian contractors page.

    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.

  4. Re:branding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    .NET was too ambiguous. It was their new programming vision and they also starting referring to their new servers and Windows .NET server. Microsoft realized that people didn't understand what the hell .NET was any more.

  5. Fedora is good, but... by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting
    There just aren't enough packages in it. It's just too damn small. That wouldn't be so bad, if there was any obvious way to submit RPMs. For a "community-driven project", Fedora seems to be very good at keeping the community out of things.


    (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)
  6. Re:branding by Xerp · · Score: 2, Interesting
    show me one place a "normal" person can buy a Linux machine like Dell, Gateway, or HP

    Ok.

    1. Dell and Dell

    2. HP

    And if you want "shops" that sell Linux systems: Try here

    Obviously a quick google will find even more!

    The problem is that people think a "pc" is "windows". They simply don't know any better. Sure, the thing becomes trashed by spyware and viruses within hours and thats when the go and see "the guy who knows about computers". By then of course, they have already spent their money and may or may not take Microsoft Windows back to the shop as "not fit for purpose". They can't see that the TCO for a Microsoft Windows system is a lot higher than the alternatives.