Interview with Red Hat's New CEO

mjasay writes "Red Hat just got a new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, but based on a recent CNET interview with him, he's cut from the same cloth as Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's former CEO. He won't buy an iPod because it won't play Ogg Vorbis files. He refused other CEO roles because he 'must have a mission.' He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business. And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million. It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses, according to Whitehurst."

Comments

where does Red Hat need to start?

[alizard]

There's a reason why the popular distros are Debian based. Apt just plain works better than rpm. It handles dependency management far better, and if a repository is down, installers like apt-get based on apt note that the repo is down and keep right on going. I went from FC6 to Debian Etch a year ago, and installation has worked so much better since then that my main regret about Debian is that I didn't do it right to begin with and start my Linux experience with it.

SuSE YaST works better than yum for software installation because of some elaborate hacks. I see it as a clever, impressive way of avoiding the basic problem.

A year or so ago, RH promised to fix rpm to make it as useful as apt. If Red Hat wants to take over the Linux world, either making rpm as good as apt or switching its package management over to apt is where they should start. A good package management environment would probably save Red Hat enough money to allow them to break even within a year on their investment even if it doesn't increase their sales.

Given a choice, I'd rather see them fix rpm. Software monocultures make me nervous, and a better rpm would probably make conversions via Debian alien work better on this box.