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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.""

6 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Oh no... by vmcto · · Score: 5, Funny

    Natural Selection vs. Intelligent Design

    The debate rages on...

  2. Re:Natural Selection by bach37 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not intelligent design?

    /end sarcasm

  3. In fact... by Otter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The Linux distro consolidation has already happened. There used to be all these "____ Will Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop!" commercial distros that people thought would get traction, but none of them ever did. (Yeah, I know, Lindows -- have you ever heard of anyone actually using Lindows? There's nothing there but marketing.)

    Everyone has converged to the Red Hat family, the Debian/Ubuntu family, SuSe, Mandrake and Gentoo. The fact that Distrowatch has a zillion microdistros is irrelevant. (Please, do not pester me with Distrowatch popularity stats.)

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  4. Incumbent disparages competitor's products by Skowronek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    News at 11.

    Seriously, does anybody expect Redhat's CEO to announce that "Novell is a serious contender, and Redhat is about to lose market advantage"?

  5. Natural Selection Naturally Includes Them Too by ausoleil · · Score: 5, Interesting
    What Matthew Szulik is actually clamoring for is more sales for Red Hat, especially when he takes a swipe at SuSe, which is one of Red Hat's strongest competitors. Subtle Szulik isn't.

    The truth is that the number of distros is good for the industry. Sure, it sets back Red Hat's bottom line, but a lot of people use Linux because it is free as in beer. The Debian distros in particular come very close to rivalling the "products" that Red Hat, et. al, distribute, and as far as support, "Google is your friend."

    Szulik and company actually hurt their own sales when they decided to focus solely on the enterprise market and leave the smaller potatoes out to fend with Fedora. SuSe still offers a nice packages distro for those that want one, and they took a lot of the folks who had used Red Hat's products previous to their being abandoned. Others went with Debian, and some Fedora. None of these choices generate profits for Red Hat.

    Sorry the little guys weren't big enough for you to worry about, Matt, but there are other choices in the Linux world to use. That may be bad for you, but it is good for us. And Matt, let's tell it like it is: you need us more than we need you. That's how FOSS works, so get used to it.

  6. Re:Natural Selection by g2devi · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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