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Red Hat CEO Szulik on Linux Distro Consolidation

Posted by Hemos on from the from-your-first-drawing-breath-to-your-last-dying-day dept.

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.""

2 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. When will RedHat address the "rpm hell" problem? by bogaboga · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    That question ought to be answered. When will it go away for good on Linux systems? Even apt-get with debs is not that perfect though it's better than rpm and its equivalent manager. Autopackage looked promising, but seemed to be shunned by distros packagers. What looks promising is klik http://dot.kde.org/1126867980/ from the KDE folks. I will not be surprised if it too, gets sidelined by the major distros.

    If we in the OSS world want to be deemed a serious contender, we MUST solve user's problems. As far as Linux goes, software management is still a huge problem.

    I have a dream; and I hope the time will come, when if one talks of a software for Linux, this software can install across all Linux based distros.

  2. Software Developers by nofsinga · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I think that in order for the masses to switch over to a Linux distro, they need to be able to use their apps on Linux. For instance, I use heavily Visual Studio .NET, and lots of Games ( HL2, Counter-Stike:Source, DoD:Source, Doom3, Star Wars Games, etc... etc.. ), and other programs that I just can't use in my SuSE distro (got a dual-boot machine).

    I know there are always alternative open source proggies for some applications (OpenOffice, for example), but this is not always the case, and some things (such as video games) are very difficult to duplicate, especially when they have a great gaming community.

    I really wouldn't mind switching to SuSE full-time otherwise. :-)