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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)
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.
I find it very interesting that Redhat hasn't entered the PPC arena yet. I mean it wouldn't hurt them from the company standpoint. They could do it by either by bying LinuxPPC or another similar company, or starting to port Redhat themselves.
It would make them more revenues than the Alpha port. I'm not saying that they should drop Alpha (to make it clearer, I would never want the Alpha version to be dropped) but it would be a bigger market. Imagine many people who have a spare Mac at home suddenly trying Linux because there is this big Linux distro that's told about in the press and the news.
I'm not criticising LinuxPPC or the other existing powerpc linux distributions either, I'm merely just saying that it would be really nice if Redhat would support that platform too. It wouldn't hurt the Linux community, but it would definately help "pushing" Linux on Macs. I find it sad that the whole Linux thingie in the press is focusing on x86, and something like this could change that for the better.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
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