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Red Hat Exchange Is Dead

Posted by timothy on from the milk-for-free dept.

darthcamaro writes "In 2007, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) — an appstore, if you will, of open source partner applications sold from a Red Hat website. Sounds like a good idea, right? While an appstore works well for Apple, turns out that an appstore for open source (from a Linux vendor) isn't such a good idea. 'When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but we've learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is challenging,' Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development said. 'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'"

13 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe... by StrategicIrony · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybed if they loaded it up with DRM, put restrictive policies in place to block certain apps and prevented open source publication of published apps, they would have been more successful.

    Then again, maybe not.

    1. Re:Maybe... by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, I think it really has to do with expectations. I have a friend who sells an app in the Android app store, and also provides it for free on his website--- both source and binary versions. Plenty of people still buy it from the app store, because that's what they're used to doing.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:Maybe... by Tiger4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If the App store offered some kind of seal of approval it might have done better. Say what you will about DRM at Apple, the app store at least gives the impression that all the apps there will work seamlessly together.

      OSS may be the greatest development model, bug fixes better and faster, blah blah blah, but really what people want to know is that it is going to work. If a knowledgeable, trusted, third party says it will, people value ($$$) that highly. No one likes to waste time on crappy apps, hoping a fix will come along RSN.

      --
      Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
    3. Re:Maybe... by ickleberry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe you are used to having phones that were closed box, but back in the day I went from having a phone that couldn't run any apps to having a phone that could install and run .jar and .jad J2ME applications and I had to go and look for them on the interwebs.

      Unfortunately as time went on a lot of crapware J2ME got released that were basically just front-ends for commercial web services and a lot of the J2ME app sites got greedy, put all their sponsored crapware at the top and charged programmers to have their apps (even freeware) listed.

      Even so, going from installing .jar/.jad and later .sis/.sisx seems to a limited 'app store' seems like a huge step backwards to me.

  2. A Linux 'app store' is like a church of atheism by eparker05 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most Linux projects are either made by FOSS hobbyists, or by big-name corporations, neither of those groups want to be tied into a distribution system owned by Red Hat.

  3. Au contraire... by Angst+Badger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'

    Actually, it sounds like the market worked with almost textbook efficiency.

    --
    Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
    1. Re:Au contraire... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It really mystifies me how a corporation can understand the concept of open source, but can't understand that in such a market distributors have 0 value. Open source software can't be sold as a product unto itself. It must be sold as a larger value add. Simply listing a bunch of software and saying, "Search through this for what you need" is not valuable because it doesn't provide anything substantially more than what people get on the internet for free. However, if you have a good sales force and are able to provide some upfront analysis of a customer's problem, I suppose you might be able to make some money. A large corporation might ask, "this is the problem we have, who would be best to solve it?" Finding the appropriate people to do the work (including supplying software, support and training) could be valuable. The thing is, I rather suspect that this will never happen. Having talked to Novel sales people before, and reading this article where Redhat talk about "partnering in various sales channels" I get the impression that they still think they are selling software. Nowhere do I see them understanding the idea of matching *people* with problems to *people* with solutions.

      I guess we'll see.

  4. As compared with? by SteveFoerster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I never used RHX, so this is a serious question: What did this give people that, for example, Synaptic Package Manager or even the Ubuntu Software Center doesn't?

    --
    Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
    1. Re:As compared with? by MSG · · Score: 3, Insightful

      RHX was intended to be a marketplace. Software and support contracts were to be sold there. Here is an article covering its release; it's one of the wikipedia references.

      Synaptic and Software Center are tools, like PackageKit and up2date are in Fedora and RHEL. RHX wasn't an tool.

  5. RHX may be dead; captive markets are for zombies by ipX · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The summary left out the important bit of the quote...

    "When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace."

    I think part of the problem here is not so much the App store itself, but the fact that there is no FLOSS captive market to force $1.99 apps upon. Another factor may be that Red Hat is great since they support and tailor their product for a very specific purpose, but I'm not sure they really have the pull to make an App store with enough sales volume.

  6. Phone Message for Redhat by Xeleema · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Hey guys! This is Mike over here at Linspire! Listen, I'm calling from 2002 so I have to make this short; We have this great idea called 'Click-N-Run', where people will be able to use a client-side application to buy Linux software from commercial 3rd party vendors. We're gonna be huge!"

    --
    "When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
  7. Re:The ideal would be to merge Freshmeat with Yum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    You'd probably have to cook it first.

  8. Maybe it's cuz by lena_10326 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    yer tryin to sell shit to people who think everything is free. Duh.

    --
    Camping on quad since 1996.