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Red Hat Gets New CEO
xjamie writes "Red Hat has more changes under their hat. CNet is running a story saying Matthew Szulik will replace Bob Young as Red Hat's CEO." So we went and bothered Bob at the LinuxToday booth. The deal is that he is going to be the Chairman, and focus more on the Open Source aspects of the business, and Matthew is gonna be more concerned with the next quarter's bottom line.
This move really shows balance on RedHat's part, IMO.
On the one hand, they have a real need to grow their revenues. They're a public company now, and as such are beholden to their shareholders to maximize the company's value. Bringing in a "suit" is, sadly, the only real way to do it.
On the other hand, keeping Young as chairman shows that they are in fact sticking to their roots, at least for the foreseeable future. He's consistently spoken about the fact that RH is all about Open Source (no flames from the purists, please!), and the moves made ever since the IPO have reinforced that notion.
All told, RHAT is behaving exactly the way a public open-source company shoul.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
On the face of it, this looks like a great move by Red Hat. However, I'm horribly cynical and full of paranoia, so can't help wonder if Bob Young's been "Kicked Upstairs" by more ruthless, agressive executives, to help appease the shareholder's thirst for blood & money, in equal doses.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
does this mean that they will go back to their $20/$30 distrobutions?
I'd really like to plead with Redhat for
more visible support on the Alpha platform.
Maybe then even onto the PPC platform (but
I'm happy with LinuxPPC and YellowDog!).
I'm concerned that the website hardly mentions
the Alpha. For a while the press releases
have always had an implicit x86 support in them.
The ftp sites have lagged behind in the Alpha
support areas.
Or is this a case where Alpha users need to band
together more?
edko
Could Mr. Young be making a play for greater fame/fortune? It seems as if this move could place him in the "man behind Linux" spot, at least in the media's eye. Maybe I'm misinterpreting Mr. Young's intentions, but with the RH IPO doing so well, this seems to be something of a PR play. I don't know the man, but this sort of thing coupled with the recent formation of their Open Source group just reeks of narcissism to me. But perhaps I'm wrong...
Maybe you'll return to Minagua, You could go unnoticed in such a place. -FZ
A Little Background on Mathew Szulik.
So, is he going to play nice? He used to be Red Hat's President.
Joseph Elwell.
"We want to keep as many of those people as we can find productive and useful and challenging [jobs] for,"
In other words, don't be surprised to see the first big layoffs in the Linux world. Hundreds of CS students who worked like mad for 4 years to get this far and it's all over in one single swipe of the pen. They'll join last week's 300 layoffs at Avid and last month's 3000 layoffs at SGI. Thank god I don't work for Cygnus.
http://stor e.redhat.com/commerce/store.cgi?page=/more_rhl_sta ndard.html
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Cygnus was profitable and growing before being bought, ie, they had no reason to reduce the employee count. There is practically no overlap with RedHat. Why the heck would they want to lay off anybody at all? There might be a bit of managerial overlap, but since both were growing, any duplication of jobs would be temporary. I'd be surprised at more than a handful of bye byes.
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Infuriate left and right
I've never been one to criticize Red Hat for their corporate aspirations, but I have to say I'm not too happy about the likely outcomes from this new arrangement.
In the first place, Szulik said in March that he wouldn't want to see the LSB being used by other Linux vendors with less market share to catch up with Red Hat. With him now firmly installed in the driver's seat, it now seems unlikely that Red Hat will be making any concessions towards compatibility standards for Linux, and as an inevitable consequence there will be no change in the trend towards distribution-specific software releases. That's fine if you're a Red Hat user, of course.
In the second place everybody knows that these days corporate control rests with the CEO; the position of chairman is often little more than a sinecure. Moving Young (and his Open-Source outlook along with him) into this figurehead position necessarily makes him rather peripheral to the daily decision-making process.
However before he departs for his higher plane of existence as chairman, he leaves us with a warning, referring to their current policy of acquisition: "We intend to scale this business as quickly as we can to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us".
First comes gcc maintainers Cygnus - a done deal by all accounts - and next, perhaps, Linuxcare - their primary competitor in the support market. And plenty of money available thereafter, no doubt, for further shopping sprees.
Marvellous. Now Red Hat is swallowing up all who come before them. Hmmm...now where have we seen this strategy employed before?
I remember seeing a little while ago a piece of satire predicting that a couple of decades into the new millennium, Red Hat are the subject of an Anti-Trust investigation, with a much-reduced Microsoft among the plaintiffs. It was just internet humour and it did seem funny at the time. But it's beginning to look like prophecy now. Are we about to replace one tyrant with another?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
One acquisition does not a monopoly make. Cygnus is not a Redhat competitor, rather what they have accomplished is vertical integration.
I agree with you, but we're losing the larger picture.
How can you have a monopoly on free software? That's like trying to have a monopoly on sunlight. You cannot do it. In order to have a monopoly, Red Hat would have to buy up every developer of every program in all of their products. That covers the entire globe, and countless countries. Even assuming all of them would be willing to do it.
Even then, what does Red Hat have? A bunch of people, that is all. The source code is still open. It cannot be locked up by any company. If Red Hat goes wrong, anyone can pick up the pieces and move on.
The power of free software is that it will always be free.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If Redhat is able to gain OEM deals and support contracts, the revenue from the shipping product becomes insignificant. This allows them to ship it for near free, to allow home users to play around with it and become more familiar with their variant. In corporations choosing Linux (if it comes to that), they'll be pressured to choose Redhat. I mean, if your users are more comfortable with it, why choose another distribution...
It IS the Microsoft business plan, and it worked really well. There is a KEY different. If LSB takes off, even without Redhat support, then supporting Linux requires making your code work in TWO environments that are largely similar.
While Redhat may become the new Microsoft, free software makes it surprisingly MORE difficult to embrace and extend. Proprietary extensions would be interesting, but open source purists could include any missing libraries in their distributions of software, and it would be easy to write PURE opensource software that would run on the proprietary Linux versions...
As far as Corel... don't be shocked to see Redhat buy Corel, hostile or otherwise. Even with Corel's stock runup, their capitalization of $600m would be an easy buy for Redhat.
Redhat can also buy up to 10%-15% without notifying the SEC, that should be enough to get a board seat, and possibly enough to launch a takeover attempt. It would be interesting, because making Wordperfect Office for Linux proprietary to Redhat would insure that businesses that are using Linux on desktops would have to use Redhat.
With a cheap Linux, a vendor that wants to make a better GNU platform would have trouble being profitable. This platform would only appeal to geeks (who download, not buy the OS), and makes it difficult to compete. By makings the OS free (cost wise), it moves the competition to applications that are specific to your distribution...
I think that we are about to see a fork in the platform... Redhat is going to make a play to be a proprietary Linux. We'll see what this does to the community.
Alex