On the record with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's new CEO

January 4, 2008 Leave a comment

When Red Hat announced that Jim Whitehurst, the COO of Delta, would be taking over for Matthew Szulik there were quite a few skeptics. As I noted, going outside the tech industry for a CEO has had both its ups and downs. After reading this interview of Jim Whitehurst by Matt Asay, I have to admit that I am more optimistic than I was before. A couple snippets:

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?

I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.

…

When the airline industry appeared to be falling apart, Delta’s CEO asked me to be COO. I had been serving as the treasurer of the company (while still at BCG). I became the finance/strategy guy for a few years and ran Delta for the past two years with the company, except for Finance, reporting to me. I left Delta on good terms.

I looked at doing further corporate turnaround work. But I’ve found that I have to have a mission to fuel my work. I can’t just work for a paycheck. Just turning around a random company had no interest for me.

Red Hat appealed to me. Red Hat is different. By doing well as a company at Red Hat we are doing good. Open source is a way to focus on the customer, letting us grow, succeed, and change the technology landscape…all while doing something that is fundamentally good. Fighting for open standards and open formats. These things will change society. I’m thrilled to be here.

…

When I look at the quality of our existing technology, and the incredible brand that we have and the markets we play in, we should be a $5 billion company or more. If you just look at operating systems and middleware – that’s nearly a $100 billion business. We’re a $500 million business. We have barely scratched the surface.

We need to figure out what our “fair share” of each market should be and aggressively go after it. We need to make sure we nail the markets we’re already in. I’m not saying we won’t go broader, but we really need to ensure we’re building our presence in our core markets and technologies. Perhaps we need to set our ambitions a bit higher.

…

You just became leader of the “free world.” You also must appease Wall Street, which cares less about freedom of code and more about certainty of profits. How do you balance the two? Developers and investors?

I actually don’t think it’s a hard line to walk at all. If you fundamentally believe, which I do, that open source is a superior way to develop software, then that is our mission and that is what we’re going to do.

There will always be distractions: suggestions that we should make a product proprietary, the idea that we can get to revenue faster by adding proprietary this or that. But we fundamentally believe this is a better way to build a software business. The two groups are appeased together.

It’s all about serving your core constituency – the customer.

I suggest you read the entire interview, but I really like what he’s saying from both a technical and business perspective. I’d say that under Jim there is a very good chance we’ll see Red Hat become the first pure play $1 Billion Open Source company. From there, the sky is the limit.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Red Hat

Voting for the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is Now Open

January 3, 2008 Leave a comment

I just opened the polls for the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. There are 27 polls this year, more than even before. This is the 7th time we’ve run the LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, and we’ve had a record turnout each and every year. The polls close on February 21st. This is your chance to help quality Open Source projects get the attention they deserve. We had some extremely close races last year, and I’d expect this year to be no different.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Open Source

A quasi-comprehensive look at Open Source in 2007

December 31, 2007 Leave a comment

Did you miss some of the Open Source happenings in 2007? Would you like a quick overview of those happenings? You’re in luck. Matt Asay put together a two part overview that is succinct but fairly comprehensive. Thanks Matt.

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source

Matthew Szulik resigns as Red Hat CEO, is replaced by an airline COO

December 21, 2007 1 Comment

Matthew Szulik has somewhat abruptly announced his departure as CEO of Red Hat. He will remain on as chairman of the board. It’s extremely sad to see this is a result of family illness (which is sometimes a euphemism in CEO departures, but in this case is legitimate from what I understand). From his recent post:

After almost a decade of leading Red Hat, I have decided to transition my CEO and President role for the personal reasons I have already discussed. It’s my privilege to continue serving this great company in the role of Chairman of the Board. Red Hat will be in the capable hands of a world-class executive team under the leadership of Jim Whitehurst as President and CEO.

My early days at Red Hat were sitting in small office with no door in Durham, NC, across from the free soda machine. People by the hour would stop and punch their selection for Mountain Dew or Coke. My challenge was that I was tasked to go and raise venture money for this free software company. And over the phone, in the middle of my sales pitch, corporate types at Dell, IBM and HP and others would hear the constant banging of soda cans dropping in the soda machine and would ask if there were fights going on outside my office. So, after a while, I told the prospective investors that YES there were fights going on. And yes, these fights happened frequently. It’s how people at Red Hat settled technical issues likes software bugs and features in new releases. Red Hat was a real tough place to work. Dell, HP and IBM became investors because they liked the fighting spirit of Red Hat.

I wish Matthew and his family the best in what must be extremely trying times. This is also going to be a huge transition for RHT. Szulik epitomized the fighting spirit and disruptive nature that embodied Red Hat. The choice of an airline COO as the next CEO is one that will surely draw both fans and critics. The airline industry isn’t really known for its transparency, which is absolutely key in an Open Source company… and truth be told, Delta is not exactly known for great customer service (which would be the responsibility of the COO). That being said Jim Whitehurst does seem to have some technical chops and it’s even been confirmed that he’s a Fedora user, which should ease the some of the fear that Red Hat employees have to be feeling right now. It also seems that through the entire interview process Jim has impressed. He has huge shoes to fill as Matthew was not only one of the most successful Open Source CEO’s to date, but a CEO that was liked by his company. Going outside the tech industry for a CEO has had mixed results in the past. It was a nightmare when a PepsiCo CEO took over the reigns at Apple, but worked out well when a RJR Nabisco CEO took over at IBM. How it works out in the case remains to be seen. The implications not only for Red Hat, but for Open Source, will be huge. You can bet many eyes will be watching closely.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Red Hat

Update on the Sun/NetApp ZFS patent litigation: Change of venue, prior art

December 19, 2007 Leave a comment

A follow up on some previous coverage. It looks like Sun has provided an update to Matt about the pending ZFS litigation.

As of Friday, December 14, Sun has filed reexamination requests for three Network Appliance patents as part of its response to a lawsuit initially filed by Network Appliance against Sun on September 5, 2007. This follows the agreement last month with Network Appliance to transfer Network Appliance’s lawsuit from Texas and litigate it along with the case Sun filed in California. The motion to transfer was filed on November 21 and the cases are now assigned to a mutually agreed upon judge. With each company being headquartered in northern California and the majority of inventors and innovation in dispute originating in California, it makes sense for this case to be litigated in this jurisdiction. We are pleased that Network Appliance agreed to Sun’s request and retracted its imprudent choice of venue for this litigation.

Reexams have been filed on the NetApp WAFL patents that purportedly cover concepts such as copy on write, snapshot and writable snapshot. There is a significant amount of prior art describing this technology that was not in front of the US patent office when it first examined these patents. In just one example, the early innovation by Mendel Rosenblum and John Ousterhout on Log Structured File Systems, applauded in a NetApp blog as being inspirational to the founders, was not considered by the patent office in the examination of the NetApp patents.

Sun is committed to protecting innovation and the open source community against this attack. The reexamination of three Network Appliance patents seeks to ensure the open source community continues to have access to technology that Network Appliance did not invent. Sun is also in the process of identifying other Network Appliance patents to be reexamined. We continue to receive support from the open source community in terms of prior art and appreciate the community response to protect innovation. We would like to thank those who have sent in relevant art that has been used in connection with the reexamination requests.

Sun’s actions are in response to the suit Network Appliance brought against the company to forestall competition from the free ZFS technology. Sun’s earlier filings include patent counterclaims against the entirety of Network Appliance’s product line, including the entire NetApp Enterprise Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) products, V-series products using Data ONTAP software, and NearStore products, seeking both injunction and monetary damages.

Sun is confident in our patents and claims against Network Appliance, and pleased with the direction of our case. To view more information, including the filings, visit Sun’s Open Source Community Support page.

I don’t see any response to this from NetApp yet. It did seem odd that the suit was filed in the patent friendly Texas jurisdiction, when both companies are located in California. I’ll post additional updates on this topic as the arise.

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source, Sun

A Global Open Source Census

December 19, 2007 Leave a comment

There’s an issue that has always been contentious when it comes to Open Source. How do you accurately and definitively measure adoption. Due to the myriad ways Open Source code can be disseminated, the answer has historically been “you can’t”. Sure, you can use download metrics from mirrors and some educated guessing to come up with decent approximations, but those are neither definitively or truly accurate (and probably almost always underestimate real adoption). Enter the Open Source Census:

The Open Source Census is a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in enterprise. In short that means we want to count how many enterprise installations there are in the world for each open source software package. Results of the census will be shared on this website.

We realize that’s pretty ambitious, but we figure you have to think big. Of course we know that we can’t count every single open source package in every single company, but we think we can get a big enough sample to make it representative.
How it Works

Companies can use an open source software tool called OSS Discovery to automatically scan a sampling of machines in their organization. These scans will gather completely anonymous data on which open source packages and versions are installed. The scan results can then be submitted to a repository on The Open Source Census website. Scan contributors can review the actual results of the scans before they decide whether to contribute the data. Contributors will be asked to provide some limited demographic data to enhance reporting of the results.

It’s a lofty goal to be sure, and whether it gains any traction remains to be seen. Even if it does take off, it’s aimed only at the Enterprise which will certainly skew results. That being said, it’s definitely better than nothing and the information gleaned should be quite valuable. Additionally, the OSS Discovery tool should be a great way for an Enterprise to track its Open Source usage. Data collection will begin in Q1 2008.

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source

Red Hat: BofA Downgrades; Cites Troubles With JBoss

December 17, 2007 Leave a comment

(via Matt) Following news that Novell may be building momentum comes news that Bank of America has downgraded RHT. As is often the case with stock analysts, more are piling on the downgrade now. From Barrons:

Red Hat (RHT) shares are lower today after Bank of America analyst Kirk Materne cut his rating on the stock to Neutral from Buy. His price target goes to $21 from $23.

Materne says the company’s fiscal third quarter ended November should be “solid,” but that its JBoss application server software “continues to have trouble gaining momentum.” He adds that there are “few catalysts on the horizon” that could add to current billings and cash flow growth estimates for the fiscal year ending in February 2008, or for that matter, FY 2009.

Meanwhile, Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research, also downgraded the stock today, moving to Equal Weight. Chowdhry contends that the company’s business fundamentals are “deteriorating,” and that the JBos acquisition “is a complete failure.”

Chowdrhy also asserts that Red Hat Linux “is gradually being relegated to a position of non-criticality.” He also says Red Hat is losing momentum in the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – to Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL). And he says hardware vendors IBM and Hewlett-Packard are providing support and bug fixes for Red Hat Linux since “vendors feel Red Hat support is not enterprise class.”

Not least, he says that developer momentum is shifting away from the Open Source LAMP software stack – Linux, Apache, My SQL, PHP – and toward Microsoft’s .Net platform.

It’s true that Red Hat is having a little more difficulty than it anticipated integrating JBoss. When you acquire an Open Source company, much of what you are acquiring is the people. Many of the top JBoss people have left. The cultures were different, the sales models were different and I’d guess given the information Red Hat has now, they’d have done things a little bit differently. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I think the long term benefits for Red Hat and JBoss are still there.

Moving on to the Global Equities Research comments, I have no idea where Trip is getting his information. All other leading indicators I’ve seen indicate that Linux and Open Source are doing quite well in BRIC and other emerging markets (and in many of those markets Microsoft is either having difficulty gaining traction or is gaining traction by discounting heavily). Additionally, more and more companies are clearly choosing Linux for absolute mission critical applications. The NYSE is a recent example of this. Finally, LAMP adoption in general has been seeing very strong growth and MySQL AB still seems headed toward its IPO, despite the weakening US economy. It just goes to show that an “analyst” can say just about anything they want, typically with little to no justification or real repercussions.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, Novell, Open Source, Red Hat

Not much SMB dollars today for open-source vendors, the 451 Group finds

December 10, 2007 Leave a comment

Matt points to a report by The 451 Group indicating that Open Source has not had much penetration in the SMB market.

It’s not surprising to see The 451 Group’s findings that the small-to-medium-sized business market doesn’t promise untold riches to open-source vendors. The SMB market is difficult to crack regardless of one’s licensing and marketing approach. Several of open source’s primary benefits – and particularly the ability to modify code to suit one’s requirements – fit large companies well and SMBs almost not at all.

Some key findings from the report, which surveyed 50+ open-source vendors:

* 73.8% of open-source vendors surveyed believe that SMB revenue will account for <50% of total revenue, with wide disparity in how much the surveyed vendors feel will come from the SMB market;

* Open-source vendors are split on whether SMB will account for a significant increase in business in the future, 47.5% saying that it will and 34.4% saying it won't.

* The overwhelming majority of open-source vendors (72.1%) are taking a direct approach to selling into the SMB market, despite citing "Lack of expertise" (36.1%) and "Lack of awareness of open source options" (24.6%) as the key inhibitors to SMB adoption.

Chart

The brand recognition and integrated solutions offered by Microsoft are very entrenched in the SMB market. The smaller a company, the less likely they are to have a dedicated IT staff that is able to understand Open Source. That means either the person who “knows the most about computers” or a 3rd party handles most IT related issues. In most cases, that’s going to lead to a Microsoft install. Add to this the fact that many of the current commercial Open Source companies are selling products that are squarely aimed at the Enterprise market, and the report really is no surprise. There is good news here though. The SMB market is clearly a great place for potential future growth, in time.

–jeremy

Filed under Microsoft, Open Source

Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

December 3, 2007 Leave a comment

It looks like an issue I’ve been watching closely, due to its ramifications for the LQ Wiki, may be close to a resolution. From a Creative Commons post:

As announced last night by Jimmy Wales (video), the Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution on licensing:

* The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
* Upon the announcement of that relicensing, the Foundation will initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

The full resolution can be found here. So far there are 5 approvals and one missing vote. Lawrence Lessig expands on what the announcement means in this post:

As you’ll see in this video, there has been important progress in making Wikipedia compatible with the world of Creative Commons licensed work. But we should be very precise about this extremely good news: As Jimmy announces, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has agreed with a proposal made by the Free Software Foundation that will permit Wikipedia (and other such wikis) to relicense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

That is very different from saying that Wikipedia has relicensed under a CC license. The decision whether to take advantage of this freedom granted by the FSF when the FSF grants it will be a decision the Wikipedia community will have to make. We are very hopeful that the community will ratify this move to compatible freedoms. And if they do, we are looking forward to an extraordinary celebration.

This is clearly something a lot of people worked very hard on and it’s great to see it finally happen. Kudos to everyone involved. We had been handling GFDL content with a separate namespace at the LQ Wiki, but we’ll work on merging that content into the main namespace now, which as always been licensed CC by-sa.

–jeremy

Filed under FSF, Open Source

Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008

November 29, 2007 1 Comment

A key benefit of Linux, and Open Source in general, is flexibility. Linus underscores this in a recent interview:

In your opinion, where does Linux shine versus Windows? Reliability? Virtualisation?

I think the real strength of Linux is not in any particular area, but in the flexibility. For example, you mention virtualisation, and in some ways that’s a really excellent example, because it’s not only an example of something where Linux is a fairly strong player, but more tellingly, it’s an example where there are actually many different approaches, and there is no one-size-fits-all “One True Virtualisation” model.

There are many different levels of virtualisation, and many different trade-offs in efficiency, management, separation, running legacy applications and system software, etc. And different people simply care about different parts of it, which is why the buzz-word “virtualisation” shows up in so many places.

And not only do we tend to support many different models of virtualisation, but one telling detail may be that I am personally so totally uninterested in it, that I am really happy that I have almost nothing to do with any of them.

And I mention that as a strong point of open source! Why? Because it actually is a great example of what open source results in: one person’s (or company’s) particular interests don’t end up being dominant. The fact that I personally think that virtualisation isn’t all that exciting means next to nothing.

This is actually the biggest strength of Linux. When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can’t fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity’s sense of the market. It doesn’t matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it’s going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn’t even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.

And what does that then lead to? Linux ends up being very good at a lot of different things, and rather well-rounded in general. It’s also very adept at taking up any new niche, because regardless of where you want to put it, not only has somebody else probably looked at something related before but you don’t have to go through license hassles to get permission to do a pilot project.

You’ll see Linux in more places than almost any other OS. Open Source is the reason for this. As Linus mentions, anyone can jump in and makes Linux do whatever it is they need to do. From a DVR to a watch to a storage deice to a super computer – Linux is not only there, it’s doing well. I’ve also always liked how Linus frames Microsoft:

I simply don’t use Microsoft products, not because I hate them, but because they aren’t interesting to me.

He doesn’t bash and doesn’t instigate – a bit refreshing really.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft, Open Source

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