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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."
No, but he runs Red Hat now.
*ducks*
Isn't their core business providing SRPMS to CentOS?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
I worked for SGI when I was an intern. This was back when they were realizing that nobody wanted to pay $20k for a workstation anymore.
SGI had some pretty kick-ass server gear and had just purchased Cray, so naturally they responsed by coming up with a half-ass NT desktop that, likewise, nobody wanted. They played to their weakness rather than their strength, and the result was that they lost bigtime.
This strikes me as being similar: They're playing to their weakness, trying to get to where everyone else is doing well and not realizing that (a) the space is already fairly saturated and (b) the competitors waiting for them there are better than they are at the sort of thing they do.
And who gives a shit if he's a OSS zealot? The way to help out our common interest here is to succeed -- I don't care if the guy will only listen to 8-tracks, I want to hear his plan for turning the company around. This isn't like an airline where your ass can be bailed out by the cyclical nature of the business -- while people always need an airplane to get someplace, in the end they really don't need your distro. You can't just keep flying and charge $5 for snack boxes.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"I believe what you believe ... blah blah blah ... trust me, I'm good, not evil ... blah blah blah ... again, I believe what you believe ... we're great, but we should be 10x better ... blah blah blah ... you need to work harder, focus more, and buy our stuff .. blah blah blah".
If this is "News For Nerds" to you, then you've been living under a rock for the last 30+ years...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
"It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses" - whoops, looks like his corporate speak backing statement is talking about cutting costs, not top line growth. You can make a company more profitable with these tasks, but it doesn't outline how you're going to make more money.
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
Gosh, what is it with people that think linux needs this or that to "survive". Linux is by far the most ported OS of all time, it works everywere in embeded devices, probably in your wifi router, probably in your home isdn/cable/ADSL router.
It powers google, a good chunk of yahoo and im pretty sure some good part of the online infrastructure at microsoft, ibm, hp and many other non-it related companies.
Linux is NEVER going to die, with or without adobe on board. Adobe is not porting due to they feeling its not worth it. But FOSS may very well give them a run for their money. Weve done it before, we will do it again and, when the time comes that Adobe sees a market for linux, they may very well end up being the underdog in our ecosystem due to them not starting to compete earlyer with equivalent foss solutions.
Now. Is Linux going to Conquer The World? I dunno. I hope it does.
NO SIG
I love CentOS as much as the next guy, but lets face it, their job is to compile srpms giving a clone of RHEL. They do it well, but thats hardly a "contribution" to anything.
It's a contribution to Redhat. When people who've been using CentOS at home or for development want support at work, which distro do you think they'll buy support for? It's also a contribution to the community, because they explicitly make sure all the GPL code stays available and compilable. I wouldn't doubt if they find and report (and probably fix) bugs as well.
His refusal to buy iPod has also to do with that stuff called "vote-with-your-wallet" that /.ers are often talking about.
...On the other hand, at least the iPod isn't some PlaysForSure crap...
Yes, by buy an iPod and replacing the firmware with Rockbox he *could* get OGG/Vorbis to play on his iPod.
*BUT*, by doing so, he would be giving money and thus encouraging a company that refuses to support OGG/Vorbis out of the box and that is known to actively discorage homebrew hacking of their hardware (see iPhone).
He would be better giving his money to a company that does openly support OGG/Vorbis (Samsung or the countless no-name asian USB stick/media players) or at least a company that publicly encourage 3rd party developers and 3rd party media codecs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.