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

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: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.