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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.""
> Novell had their own distro before acquiring SuSE
t e-2004/FTLinuxCourse/en/net/chap5.html0 67.html
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_Comple
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1996/11/msg01