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Interview with Red Hat's New CEO

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the impossible-growth-charts-impress-investors dept.

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."

5 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. ogg on ipod indeed possible! by mwilliamson · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hey Jim, you can play ogg vorbis on an Ipod, so fear not. You just need to replace its built-in O/S with Linux first. Rockbox makes this possible, and easy to do. http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005957

    1. Re:ogg on ipod indeed possible! by Neil+Hodges · · Score: 4, Informative

      Umm, RockBox isn't Linux. It does share some code with iPL, but it isn't a Linux derivative itself, though it does give the iPod the ability to play more formats than Apple does. Unfortunately, RockBox doesn't run on the 6G iPod Classic, 2G or later Nano, nor the iPod Touch. I got the 5G Video after the 6G was released, and on clearance from the somewhat-local Apple Store.

  2. Re:A question for the CEO... by Pros_n_Cons · · Score: 4, Informative

    I just wanted to know whether he'd switch Redhat to apt and .deb in the near future

    Why would he do that? RPM has many more features, more of an industry standard, etc and yum has just as many features as apt including some apt doesn't have. There is a yum is faster and uses cache just like apt and even has plugins like fast mirror. A yum update takes me 3 seconds across several different repositories. like adobe, livna, updates and kernel mods so the speed is not a problem either like 90% of other distro users still believe.
    I really hope that people get with the new decade and see RPM's are just fine since 10 years ago when you tried installing gimp.suse.rpm on a redhat box.

    --

    -- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
  3. Re:what player plays ogg files? by kbahey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually devices that you can put the alternative Rockbox firmware on them do support OGG. This includes Sansa, Archos, iRiver, Cowon and others.

    --
    2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
  4. Re:A question for the CEO... by McDutchie · · Score: 4, Informative

    In response to your comment about KDE there is a very good reason that RedHat use Gnome by default (IMHO): It is more like windows.

    The problem with KDE is that the people who design the interface refuse to acknowledge that Windows is what everyone is used to and you need to make the transition away from that as easy as possible. Gnome has certain key features (like cut and paste) that are as close to the windows functionality as possible.

    You have it exactly backwards. GNOME's user interface has become more and more like Mac OS X in several important ways, like the file chooser dialog, spatial file manager, program menu at the top of the screen, etc. etc. while KDE emulates Windows in just about every way (except it adds a bunch of features Windows doesn't have).

    And where on earth did you get the mistaken idea that KDE does not support Windows-style cut and paste? It always has.

    No, the real reason GNOME is dominant in business-oriented distributions is GTK's more liberal licensing: LGPL instead of Qt's GPL/commercial dual licensing. That means you can make a GTK/GNOME-based commercial, closed-source product without having to buy a license from the GUI toolkit's maker. With Qt and hence with KDE, that is not possible.