Red Hat CEO Szulik on Linux Distro Consolidation

Rob writes "Red Hat's CEO has rejected the idea that a reduction in the number of Linux distributions would be good for the industry, and described Novell's acquisition of SUSE Linux as "theatre". There are over 300 distributions listed on DistroWatch.com, but Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, maintained that choice and specialization outweighed any advantage that might be gained by focusing customer attention on a smaller number of offerings. He was particularly disdainful of acquiring other distributions for the sake of protecting or expanding market share. "We have zero ambition to do that," he said. "I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection.""

Comments

Re:Natural Selection

[TheMMaster]

They didn't have their own distro, their NLD offering was ALSO a repacked SuSE that was before they even bought suse actually.

Clickable distrowatch link

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it wasn't clickable in the story, here is the distrowatch.com link.

Anti-whoring AC mode enabled for this post.

Re:Natural Selection Naturally Includes Them Too

[RLiegh]

And Matt, let's tell it like it is: you need us more than we need you.

WRONG.
Look at how many FOSS pies Red Hat has their fingers in (gcc and the kernel are two that immediately spring to mind; I know there's quite a few more. Don't they also sponsor glibc development too?).
If Redhat stopped sponsoring the OSS projects they do, gcc alone would grind to a halt, and a good number of other projects would be impaired as well.

Re:Consolidation is a good thing

[SmellTheCoffee]

How many versions of Linux 2.6 are there? According to that article, around 300. It is way, way too complicated for regular people. Well...I must say you are not quite keeping up. Linux 2.6??? That is not distribution...it is a kernel. LINUX IS A KERNEL...Most distros are based on Linux kernel (2.4 series or 2.6 series) and GNU GPLed software. The correct name is GNU/Linux. As far as 300 distros are concerned...I've used about 8 (most of the major ones) and I'm quite content with what I've used and see no need to use specialized distros. With that said, what is wrong with having choices...most average users are going to go with user-friendly distros namely ubuntu, suse, redhat, fedora, mepis, mandriva etc. These distro are complete and work-out-of-the-box. On other note, Linux users/geeks are not sitting on a high horse. If you happen to visit many linux help forums on the net. You would experience that linux forums are the most user friendly.

Re:Natural Selection

[g2devi]

> Novell had their own distro before acquiring SuSE

Sort of. From what I remember, Caldera OpenLinux was originally a research project in Novell. In those days there was talk about porting WABI (a comercial product like WINE but for Win16) and the commericial equivalent of DOSEMU (I forget it's name) to Linux. This would allow Novell to use Linux as a high powered replacement for Win 3.1. Those plans appeared to be mostly hype or were abandoned when Win95 introduced Win32 and Win16 became irrelevant. Anyway, Novell Founder, Ray Noorda left Novell with several Novell employees to start Caldera. At least according to the press releases at the time, the excuse was that he was frustrated with Novell's lack of interest in Linux.

Unfortunately most press was not online during the 1994 era so I can't find many online references to back this up (anyone?). Here are a few I could google:

http://www.ftlinuxcourse.com/FTLinuxCourse_Complet e-2004/FTLinuxCourse/en/net/chap5.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1996/11/msg010 67.html

Re:Redhat is nowhere in Europe

[veg_all]

Can't be bothered to RTFA, huh?

Mr Cornett added that in fact Red Hat did more Linux business in some individual European counties than Novell did worldwide.

Novell had SUSE Linux Enterprise Server revenue of $8m in its third quarter, ended July 31, 2005, with about 47% coming from North America, 37% from EMEA, and 16% the rest of the world. In comparison, Red Hat had subscription revenue of $54.3m in its second quarter, ended August 31, 2005.

Re:Linux shouldn't be just about choice

[Procyon101]

IMHO there's a big misnomer going on here. "Linux" is not the platform anymore than NTOSKRNL.EXE is microsoft's platform... it's just a small component of the platform. From that perspective, in my view FC, Gentoo, WindowsXP, Ubuntu, OSX, Solaris, etc.. are all competitors; I put them on equal footing when choosing my platform, I don't lump them into "Windows, Mac, Solaris, Linux x 300". Now the linux variants do have the advantage of more cross-platform compatibility than say Windows to Mac, but they are completely different platforms. In the customer's mind, he should forget the word Linux altogether and determine which platform he really wants. Now sure, there are 10 million choices out there, but saying that RedHat should merge with Ubuntu to keep the choices down is about as productive as recommending that Windows and Solaris should merge because there are too many OS'. "Linux" only makes sense to developers... Customers don't care what's under the hood so stop trying to confuse them. When you ask for a car your salesmen doesn't ask if you want a BrandX alternator then give you 50 choices of wildly different cars... he asks you what you want it to do and then offers a package that works for you.

I think he is right for more than one reason.

[olddotter]

1. Natural selection, or competition is good for the end user. If it wasn't Windows might be a better OS.

2. Having different companies specialize in distributions for different markets make the products a better fit than one "do it all" distribution. RedHat might be the corporate standard in the US, but SUSE is in Europe, and then there is Asia, India, Africa, etc. And lets not forget all the types: home computer, server, desktop, geek, grand parents, mobile, embedded, realtime, hardened, softened, etc.

   In the future we might see Timelix "the best linux distro for your watch."

3. The trend seems to be more distros not less. Look at Windows, MS says there will be 7 flavors (distributions) of the next version of Windows. And that doesn't even include mobile and/or embedded versions of Windows.