Bob Young on community, criticism, and profit
In part two of this interview, Bob Young, chairman of Red Hat Software, opens up a little about the Red Hat Network, profitability, the true power of the Linux community, living with criticism from within the Linux community, and the Red Hat Center.
In part one, Young described how Slackware had earned a 90 percent market share in Linux's early days by providing downloadable software, thus offering users the latest versions instead of CDs that contained six-month-old code. Red Hat learned from that example; Marc Ewing worked on a package manager that, with financial assistance from Caldera, finally became RPM (Red Hat Package Manager), which is now the most widely used Linux package manager.
I began the second half of the interview by asking if Red Hat intended the recently launched Red Hat Network to continue the philosophy of immediate availability.
Young replied, "The Red Hat Network is very much a continuation of the philosophy that Marc [Ewing], Rick Faith, and Eric Troan really set in motion for Red Hat back in the summer of '95." Later, he added that "what the Red Hat Network is all about is making sysadmins dramatically more productive than they already are."
Since Red Hat is not currently profitable, I asked Young when he expected to get into the black. He encouraged me to direct that question to Kevin Thompson, recently named Red Hat's new CFO, or Martin Zulik, the current CFO. So I asked Young, "If Red Hat is not turning a profit, how can you continue to fund the GNOME project and numerous kernel hackers? Red Hat is well known for supporting free software projects like that, which must mean paying salaries to people who aren't doing work for the company, at least not directly." Young replied:
Well, they absolutely do direct work for us. This was really reinforced to us, that within Red Hat we have done a poor job of communicating this commitment to open source. People genuinely don't understand why we are so into doing it. Because they think, these guys are capitalists, they've got to make a return to their shareholders, they can't be that committed to open source. And we go, well, keep in mind, guys, here is how the story works, in 1996 we won InfoWorld's product of the year award, and that year we tied with Microsoft NT.
Those who were most shocked by that award were those of us at Red Hat, because there were only 23 of us, down in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, and the best Microsoft could do with a 3-year head start, a $1-billion budget, and 1,000 of the world's smartest operating system engineers, was to tie us for this award.
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