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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
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) 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)
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.
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.
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.