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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?
is his choice, who decides what is "merit"?
... The Red Hat Society?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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?
OpenStack not RHEV? That doesn't even make sense. Do you mean KVM not RHEV? How exactly is OpenStack a replacement for RHEV?
It appears plain that Red Hat has spent plenty of money on virtualization with KVM and friends.
It is plain to me that KVM and friends work fine on every other distribution.
If my goal is a KVM host, why should I buy RHEL instead of just using it on some other distribution?
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
like?
Red Hat has been involved with Linux for a long time now. We've seen a lot of desktop/workstation-oriented contributions to projects like systemd, GNOME, Wayland, and so forth.
Yet despite all of this effort, why do we see so little uptake of Linux within the desktop/workstation market? One Slashdot submission from July 2016 puts Linux's desktop market share at just over 2%. A similar submission from October 2016 puts it just over 2%, as well.
Why is Linux's share of the desktop market so abysmally low, even with several of the past releases of Windows (Vista, 8, and even 10) being widely disliked, and with Linux distributions typically being free, and after existing for over two decades now?
And should it concern us that the most widely-used Linux-based OS, Android, has actually discarded/replaced so much of the software that Red Hat has rallied behind? It's almost like Linux is most successful when the software that Red Hat is involved with is not used.
Given this lack of success, should the various desktop-oriented initiatives that Red Hat has started or worked on be considered failures?
If they aren't currently considered failures, at what point would they be considered failures? Would Red Hat's support for them be promptly terminated if they were deemed to be failures?
How would you recommend to somebody who feels they have a great application idea and is probably ready to go for Angel/1st round funding but feels that the application should be Open Source?
Do you put in customization/support as the way to fund the endeavor long term or is there another approach for the OSS conscious entrepreneur?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
More precisely, when there are far lighter DEs like Razor-qt, LXDE, XFCE, et al, why persist w/ a DE that is as heavy as KDE 5?
They are based in NC, so as of now, you need to go to the bathroom that's on your birth certificate
They are based in NC, which is some orders of magnitude cheaper than the Bay Area
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.
More and more traditional application functionality is being offered by online services, meaning less and less of it is distributed and users can't change how they work. Companies can build proprietary services and create their own private forks and fixes without contributing back to the general community. Some open source licenses encourage this, others like the GPL discourages this. The Linux kernel and a great many other parts of Red Hat Linux is built on that user freedom and enforced sharing of code.
We see Google has great success with Android under the Apache license, except for the kernel. Apple built OS X based on a BSD kernel. While open source probably has a bright future at the bottom of the stack, will it mainly become the "plumbing" of proprietary systems using non-copyleft licenses? Will copyleft applications adapt to this new hosted, service-oriented world? Be an alternative to it? More or less fade out as users move to the cloud? Obviously this won't have a definitive answer, but I'd like your thoughts on what direction we're headed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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."
So who wins in a "code off" ?,
Jim Whitehurst, Mark Shuttleworth, Tim Cook, Larry Page, or Satya Nadella.
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)
We use and love Ansible, but it still seems to be a separate product. Are there plans to integrate it more? Having it as an integrated deployment option for JBOSS Operations network (JON) would be good.
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.
Worked on SunOS, Solaris, MacOS, Red Hat, CentOS, and, more recently, Ubuntu. CIOs choose Red Hat mainly for support and reliability. Reliability is the word that comes to most engineers mind when the RH and CentOS OSes are mentioned (certainly for good reasons). Reliability mainly relies on using older kernels and features, that have been patched over and over ; sure, that works, reliability wise. But on a number of rather recent projects, comparing Ubuntu server and RH/CentOS, it appears settings services up (eg samba) was way easier on the newer Ubuntues than on the latest RH/Centos (not mentioning the many issues migrating from 6 to 7) . Also, using newer kernels, Ubuntu performs well, taking advantage of the newest internals, memory management and sharing, IPC etc ... and no specific reliability issue (IMHO, reliability wise, Ubuntu and the like are as solid as RH nowadays).
Question: in 2017, does reliability still mean using long-tested, but older kernels and features?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Red Hat is big and getting bigger. Where are you heading at the moment? Would Red Hat ever try to move into the the more consumer-focused places where Ubuntu has ventured, or is that just not profitable enough?
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.
Sir - One of the larger challenges facing the US Military is the recruitment / retention of skilled IT professionals into the military ranks, both officer and enlisted. Why do you think that is? - Gabe
Given Ubuntu's success at providing a stable, developed and popular desktop environment for non-technical consumer users, why doesn't RedHat provide the same thing? Why is that right for Ubuntu but not RedHat?
Second that.
I migrated my home environment from Solaris to Red Hat Linux for the Y2K boundary. Not too long after that, Red Hat dumped consumer support (handing it off to Fedora) to concentrate on Enterprise. Oops!
I'd have been happy to stick with Red Hat if they'd stuck with me.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I have found that RHEL is too stagnate / static to keep pace with the rate at which the kernel is now developed. The 3.10 kernel is four years old at this point and the fact that RHEL7 will be in production support until 2024 is disheartening because the enterprise industry will be a decade behind the latest kernel developments and updates from associated projects. Compared to other vendors Linux offerings, when I use RHEL I get the same feelings I got when I was force to use AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. I hated administrating those products because they were stuck with defaults like ksh from a decade ago.
My question is, would Red Hat ever consider releasing a Linux distribution with a shorter development cycle and with more aggressive tracking of upstream projects? I see a place for a distribution that is somewhere in between RHEL and Fedora. Perhaps you could morph or fork CentOS into the upstream development for RHEL? For example: Upstream --> Fedora (Bleeding Edge) --> CentOS (Next Release of RHEL) --> RHEL. This would give system engineers and architects a greater range of products to choose from and it could help stabilize RHEL even more then it already is.
In short, the Linux kernel is the largest and the fastest moving software project in the world, so what changes are you going to make to keep up with it?
Hi Jim,
Thank you for answering our questions! How do you view top-down product driven development vs bottom-up engineering driven development? Are there situations where one excels vs the other?
Thanks,
Mark
I never said it was. Personally, I'm fine w/ that, although many slashdotters would react like Meryl Streep last night and mod me down
Artificial Intelligence, in particular Deep Learning, is exploding in popularity, with major companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia openly shifting their entire strategy towards it. The technology is solving real problems, today, like cancer detection and image recognition. Many of the most important projects in AI, like TensorFlow and Theano, are open sourced. Yet it seems like Ubuntu is the lead platform for these new workloads. Many of these projects don't run on even Fedora. Is Red Hat planning to get into the AI game and if so how?
How can we improve the future of OpenStack? The dominance of Amazon has challenged the relevance of well funded players like Microsoft, Google, and IBM. How can OpenStack compete? The network effects around a dominant cloud platform threaten to relegate OpenStack to be a long term niche player, like Linux on the desktop. How can we avoid this fate?
Red Hat has distinguished itself through its commitment to open source and its ability to remain profitable.
Mike Olson famously said "you can't build a successful stand-alone company purely on open source."[1] He argues that you cannot scale an open source model that does not rely on selling proprietary components because it is too easy for competitors to undercut a vendor's services offerings when they don't have to pay for R&D.
How do you feel about that assessment? Is Red Hat's success impossible to replicate by other open source companies?
What advice to you have for building a sustainable business, especially one that is driven by open source values?
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...
As Red Hat has scaled, it has to remain staffed with all types of non-technical business professionals. How do you help these professionals learn to "sell free software"? Has it been difficult to train these professionals on the open source business model?
Hi Jim.
When I started in computing I had this notion that I was part of something that was making the world a better place. That was 40 years ago and probably based more on the science fiction of the time than reality. Somedays it doesn't feel that way anymore. Technology has come a long way and we have lots of shiny wonderful stuff, but we have a lot of downsides too. (Surveillance to name just one.)
Do you think you are making the world a better place?
Thanks for doing this.
What's really annoying is that Gnome 2 was more than good enough. They spent considerable amounts of money & time making something worse.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You've embraced. You've extended. When are you going to extinguish?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>> He believes that leaders should engage people, and then provide context for self-organizing,
Definately. The elephant in the room here is that benefit analysis has clearly shown the need for a lazer-focussed pushback. Leaders should be imagineering win-win solutions by doubling down on proactively facilitating a circling of the wagons in order to adopt deep-dive ecosystems that promote a sales-driven call to action.