Red Hat CEO Decries Open Source Pretenders

OSTalent writes "The Register has an article about Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik's recent remarks...'For all his enthusiasm about the community and sever-side Linux, Szulik provided something of a reality check on the much debated theme of a Linux desktop. According to Szulik, the huge presence of legacy infrastructure like Microsoft's Exchange and PowerPoint has prevented a lot of people making the move.'" From the article: "It's very difficult to shape the development agenda of the community... every day people comment to us on the quality of our products through Kerrnel.org. What's important is staying true to the premise of the GPL model ... It starts with the APIs now, then it moves into content. Try to put [Microsoft's] Windows Media Player into Firefox and see what it looks like. In a world where application-to-application interaction becomes the norm, where does that innovation come from and who owns it?"

Comments

Bitching doesn't help, action does.

[Trigun]

Hurry up and release the Netscape-LDAP 100% free and unencumbered.
Pick an open project for calendaring/mail and make Outlook work with it.
Create better tools for identity management.

The problem with people not embracing open source is not with open source, its that nobody knows what they're looking for with open source. Focus on what small business needs, and what open source can offer. Create small, turn-key packages. Create an LDAP authentication server. Create an LDAP mail server that operates as a drop-in replacement that works with the identity server. Create a Document Management System that works with OpenOffice, so that you have it part of the file-save dialog. Give business the tools it needs to work, and work efficiently!

The tools are better. Everyone keeps saying that they are. The design is sound, the pieces are there, but nobody has stepped up to the plate and sewn it all together. Stop the development of new tools. Take the tools that we have already and put them together. Industry needs more than Google and a Howto posted on an undergrads website.

Everybody knows that there are a million ways to authenticate a bunch of workstations to one or more server. LDAP, LDAP and Kerberos. GSSAPI, Radius, whatever, but for the love of all things sane and holy, pick one! Pick one, and build the turnkey solution to do it. /phew.

Re:Bitching doesn't help, action does.

[Trigun]

Last I checked, only the core DS is open sourced. Fedora and Red Hat are in the process of scrubbing the rest of it. Last I heard, it was the admin tools that are left. That's a big part of it for the SME.

Novell is very pricey for the SME business. They are a large installation company, or a second step company. No manager that is used to windows is going to bet the farm on Novell right out of the gate. They need an open source package to try out first. Let them grow into a Novell.

As for your last statement, that's exactly what I'm saying. It can be done, but you need somebody to do it. a lot of these companies don't have tech guys, they have Bob in accounting that's pretty good with computers. If there was a distro out there that you could drop in, it was configured as a server, with file store, e-mail, calendar, document store, and it was reasonably easy to add new users, add e-mail addresses, and find and save documents easily, then business would snap it up.

Actually there is, and it's called Microsoft Small Business Server. Make it for Linux, and make it free. Then extend it.

Re:Powerpoint??

[Muhammar]

PowerPoint(TM) is an essential thought-prevention tool. Nothing else can extend a vapid piece of generalising self-important blather into 45 minutes of a dynamic + snappy prevarocation. PowerPoint helps our management to feel better about their mission, about their goals and comitment to the cutting-edge innovation. It helps them to highlight the synergies. It facilitates indentification of the go/no-go checkpoints on their flowcharts.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Re:non-sequitur

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...

Redhat. Lets think about this.

Oh yah. They do large amounts of development work and stabilization for the 2.4 and 2.6 series kernel.

Hrm. I don't seem to be remembing anything abotu rewriting stack smashing protection and getting it actually incorporated into the GCC 4.x series.

Oh, and making SELinux usable. Na. That couldn't be Redhat. Could it?

Getting OO.org 2 ported to work with the gcj compiler instead of requiring a java runtime for many of it's features. THat couldn't be Redhat, eh?

Or how about GCC? Redhat couldn't be putting developers and resources into that project either, right?

And open sourcing GFS.. or netscape directory services, or developing and improving the ext3 file system.

Or how about Cygwin? I bet Gentoo did a lot of work on that one. Didn't they? That couldn't be Redhat could it?

I guess that doesn't amount to jack shit compared to your massive contributions to F/OSS software.

This couldn't be the company that allows projects like CentOS and Whitebox to download source code to their entire operating system and build 100% compatable clones either. Gee since they don't do that I would expect that Redhat would be big hypocrites.

Hey, how about this. Maybe Redhat has a business, and has employees and stockholders that they are responsable for. Hrm. Seems to me that each peice of software they buy or develope ends up being open source, isn't that funny for a company that doesn't give a shit?

Seems that they would behave more like original Suse did and rely on closed source management tools like Yast, or be like Gentoo, whose founder now works for Microsoft.

Give me a break. All Redhat does is:
1. Charge money for support
2. Protect their trademarks (which if you don't protect you loose unlike copyrights and patents. It takes a active effort to protect trademarks or they are invalid and anybody could use Redhat icons and call themselves redhat; including MS or IBM)
3. Don't provide binary downloads for free, except thru Fedora and Rawhide.

But they do provide the source code for everything they use... which is pretty open source, isn't it?

Mixing oil and water

[argoff]

Mixing free and closed software is like mixing oil and water. For example, you can copy share, do business with, and distribute Linux all you want. Stick a proprietary piece of software or media on the same CD, and now you are dead in the water.

Free markets are about freedom. When people have it, they tend to use it to create wealth and prosperity where none ever existed before. Closed software is not about freedom, copy it and you can be sued or go to jail. Some people call that an "intellecutal property" right, but just because someone calls something a property right doesn't mean that it is.

True property rights don't derive from incentive, they derive from just allocation of things that have limited supply and demand. Just property rights lead to strong incentives, but coerced incentives do not lead to just property rights.

Re:PowerPoint

[Hiro Antagonist]

This is actually a really good point; I have yet to see a *single* PowerPoint presentation that I would in any way consider useful, informative, or basically anything other than a complete waste of time. Reasons for this are twofold:

1. Speakers use the PowerPoint as a substitute for actually knowing the topic; they just go over whatever it says on the screen, rather than being able to articulate the topic.

2. PowerPoint is a one-way communications mechanism; you can't readily make drastic changes to a PowerPoint presentation on-the-fly, the way that you can with a whiteboard. When I hold team meetings, I generally just write down the key points on a whiteboard, and as ideas get brought up, they get written down. Sure, it's low-tech, but it works a hell of a lot better than PowerPoint.

Re:Powerpoint??

[Mostly a lurker]

If you are using someone else'e powerpoint presentation, install the PowerPoint Viewer under Wine. If it is your own presentation, develop it using something more portable. In my experience, the only times it gets tricky are

• you regularly have existing PowerPoint presentations that you must modify;
• there are complex PowerPoint presentations with hooks to Windows only features, such as VBA.

It may be possible to use Crossover Office if you are in such a position, but that is not always a total solution and anyway always seems to me to be illogical as a long term solution. After all, the whole point of a Linux move is to escape proprietary solutions, not perpetuate them.

Really, though, the existence of weird and wonderful Excel applications is usually a bigger obstacle to a conversion than the need to display some PowerPoint slides.