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:Consolidation is a good thing

[mrchaotica]

I do care if average people start migrating to Linux, because I like what I'm using. The problem is that, considering patents and Treacherous Computing, if Microsoft maintains its marketshare it'll be in a good position to kill Free Software by (indirectly) making it illegal. I say indirectly because they wouldn't make the GPL illegal, but they would mandate Treacherous Computing, which means there would be no way to run anything you compiled yourself (e.g. unsigned code).