Slashdot Mirror
Interviews: Ask Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst A Question (redhat.com)
Jim Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008, as its valuation rose past $10 billion and the company entered the S&P 500. He believes that leaders should engage people, and then provide context for self-organizing, and in 2015 even published The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (donating all proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation). The book describes a post-bureaucratic world of community-centric companies led with transparency and collaboration, with chapters on igniting passion, building engagement, and choosing meritocracy over democracy.
Jim's argued that Red Hat exemplifies "digital disruption," and recently predicted a world of open source infrastructure running proprietary business software. Fortune has already called Red Hat "one of the geekiest firms in the business," and their open source cloud computing platform OpenStack now competes directly with Amazon Web Services. Red Hat also sponsors the Fedora Project and works with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick out the very best questions, and then forward them on for answers from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Jim's argued that Red Hat exemplifies "digital disruption," and recently predicted a world of open source infrastructure running proprietary business software. Fortune has already called Red Hat "one of the geekiest firms in the business," and their open source cloud computing platform OpenStack now competes directly with Amazon Web Services. Red Hat also sponsors the Fedora Project and works with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick out the very best questions, and then forward them on for answers from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Systemd, WTF???
As I understand it, one of the stated goals was to speed up boot times. It's had exactly the opposite effect on my Ubuntu system -- that is, when the boot doesn't die altogether when I try to mount NFS shares. (Also, thanks to systemd, I can't even *reboot* or shut down the machine when there's a hung NFS process. I am forced to hard-reset it.)
For years, warning flags have been raised about systemd. It more or less seems that we're bringing all the disadvantages of the Windows architecture to Linux, without any of the advantages of running WIndows.
So, again: systemd, wtf???
Now that CentOS has received a more official status in the RH world, what are the plans for the project?
What is current commitment of Redhat with open source for 2017? Redhat may be the most profitable software company that endorse open source their products. What is the recommendation for other companies to be profitable and at the same time remain being good open source citizens?
Hi Jim,
Many proprietary hardware vendors continue not to take the Linux desktop and workstation markets seriously. Recall, e.g., Linus's rant against nvidia. As a leader in the Linux and FOSS communities, what will you do to persuade major vendors to write and maintain functional drivers for RHEL and Fedora?
Thank you,
- A.
I'm curious your thoughts on why Linux hasn't grabbed more laptop/desktop marketshare from Windows and MacOS over the years? It seems that with the privacy concerns around Windows 10 and Apple's lack of focus on MacOS there may be a huge opportunity in the near future. What things need to happen in the consumer marketplace and within the OSS community for it to really take off? Can 2017 be the year of the Linux desktop?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Orchestration is the hot topic right now for automation verses last year's configuration management tools. Ansible is more orchestration than configuration management. Puppet and Chef require tools like mCollective to pickup the orchestration piece. RedHat now runs Tower. And Tower now ships as part of the RedHat Ceph storage product. RedHat's Satellite product is based on the Foreman which includes Salt, Puppet, Chef and Ansible support.
But where is this market heading? Are we likely to see consolidation? Integrations? Or even a flood of config management system tied products from vendors?
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat on virtualization)
Red Hat and Fedora have a strict "upstream first" policy. We also have a large team working on KVM and qemu. A natural consequence of this is that we implement many features and fix many bugs in KVM/qemu, and these go upstream, and every other distribution benefits. This is great for open source. But I think your question is How is it good for Red Hat? since your implication is you can free ride on Red Hat's efforts.
There are three cases where you might benefit buying RHEL: Firstly if you call support with a serious bug, then eventually it'll get escalated likely to the person who actually wrote the original code. Secondly RHEL subscribers influence the future development direction (of course, the larger ones have a bit more influence). We really care about how our customers are using the tools. Third, you're probably not just using a single KVM host, you might want to try out OpenStack or oVirt, and we have systems architects who help customers with these larger deployments - the same architects who previously worked with large telco subscribers using OpenStack or huge bank deployments of oVirt, so they have loads of real world experience.
However if you're happy to free-ride, then us developers are happy too, because at the end of the day we really care about Free software.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I've asked this question several times but didn't get answer :)
I am running > 250 of Linux desktops at the company and can get even more, but there is no centralized management solutions for that and that's an issue with customization and security too, KDE desktop is very good at some point with it's ability to have strict configuration files and immutable options, that does about 1/4 of what we can get with MS + GPO and we see that a little effort is required to make things work.
Can we expect that RH will enter that market in the nearest (3-4 Y) future?
Thanks
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
My question is about RHCA exams. It is very good and we are very happy about RedHat new subscriptions based trainigs. It is great. But when it comes about RHCA, it is limited for locations. RHCA level exams are very expensive, and travel and accomodations makes it more expensive. I am 2xRHCE, because of these exams is available in my location. Azerbaijan Baku. MIddle EAST, Caucasus does not have center to take exam. Pease take this into consideration. Vmware, Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, OpenStack makes their exams available in everywhere online, so it is easy for everyone to take it. Why open source company limits people passions to location. I believe that me and people like me can become multi level RHCA if they get chanse to take exam in their own location. And this will help recognition and value of RedHat in regions also. PLease make this available as Cisco for us. At least make it possible on Kiosk In Georgia or Azerbaijan so we can take exams also. I am from Azerbaijan, Baku. With Loves to best open source company in the world.
Are there any plans or products to help with IoT security?
RedHat is one of the few companies that can step in and do something in regards to device security, even when device makers have little to no interest in this topic, as to them, security has no ROI, or as one IoT company exec told me, "the only person that has ever made money from a padlock is the lock maker."
Being able to lure IoT vendors to use secure tools wouldn't just benefit them, but it would benefit the Internet in a whole. Even something like manifest lists that interact with FirewallD to ensure a device is only able to communicate with authorized devices and cannot take input/output from rogue sources would improve the IoT ecosystem tremendously.