Red Hat CEO Szulik on Linux Distro Consolidation

Rob writes "Red Hat's CEO has rejected the idea that a reduction in the number of Linux distributions would be good for the industry, and described Novell's acquisition of SUSE Linux as "theatre". There are over 300 distributions listed on DistroWatch.com, but Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, maintained that choice and specialization outweighed any advantage that might be gained by focusing customer attention on a smaller number of offerings. He was particularly disdainful of acquiring other distributions for the sake of protecting or expanding market share. "We have zero ambition to do that," he said. "I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection.""

Redhat is nowhere in Europe

[TarrySingh]

and Novell is doing damn well here in Europe. Novell's acquisition of SUSE in particular was supposed to mount more of a challenge to Red Hat's dominant position as the leading enterprise Linux distributor, but Mr Szulik maintained that the purchase has had no identifiable impact on Red Hat's business No indetifiable impact. These guys are working their way into the German, Freanch and beleive me or not even the lame Dutch are beginning to sing songs on suSe.

In fact...

[Otter]

The Linux distro consolidation has already happened. There used to be all these "____ Will Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop!" commercial distros that people thought would get traction, but none of them ever did. (Yeah, I know, Lindows -- have you ever heard of anyone actually using Lindows? There's nothing there but marketing.)

Everyone has converged to the Red Hat family, the Debian/Ubuntu family, SuSe, Mandrake and Gentoo. The fact that Distrowatch has a zillion microdistros is irrelevant. (Please, do not pester me with Distrowatch popularity stats.)

It's just FUD

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Since Red Hat (for whatever reason) has had the lions share of the US corporate Linux market up to now, they have to spread a little FUD, as Novell has greater corporate name recognition than Red Hat. If I'm a PHB C?O, which distro do I use and buy support from? Hmmm, I've HEARD of Novell...

Natural Selection Naturally Includes Them Too

[ausoleil]

What Matthew Szulik is actually clamoring for is more sales for Red Hat, especially when he takes a swipe at SuSe, which is one of Red Hat's strongest competitors. Subtle Szulik isn't.

The truth is that the number of distros is good for the industry. Sure, it sets back Red Hat's bottom line, but a lot of people use Linux because it is free as in beer. The Debian distros in particular come very close to rivalling the "products" that Red Hat, et. al, distribute, and as far as support, "Google is your friend."

Szulik and company actually hurt their own sales when they decided to focus solely on the enterprise market and leave the smaller potatoes out to fend with Fedora. SuSe still offers a nice packages distro for those that want one, and they took a lot of the folks who had used Red Hat's products previous to their being abandoned. Others went with Debian, and some Fedora. None of these choices generate profits for Red Hat.

Sorry the little guys weren't big enough for you to worry about, Matt, but there are other choices in the Linux world to use. That may be bad for you, but it is good for us. And Matt, let's tell it like it is: you need us more than we need you. That's how FOSS works, so get used to it.

Re:Natural Selection

[Anonymous Coward]

The article (or rather, man interviewed) implies that, since RedHat made more money selling support, SuSE is insignificant. Never mind that there is no mention of the installed base, or any mention of how RedHat's outrageously high prices or their sudden announcement that they were getting rid of their affordable distro and only selling their expensive one might have something to do with their larger amount of money taken in... Hooray for perceived vendor lock-in forcing several companies to spend even more money!

I can tell him one thing, though. The Fortune 100 company I work for is still using RedHat some on some systems, but the official distro and way of the future is SuSE. That's partially because RHEL is a big old turd, IMHO. I guess maybe he didn't notice that when he said there was no impact, since we're still paying for RHEL as well - for now...

Re:Consolidation is a good thing

[chrismcdirty]

I really don't care if average people start migrating to Linux. I like what I'm using. I don't want what I'm using to be evolved into what Windows is now.

Re:Consolidation is a good thing

[bobintetley]

...if you Linux people don't get off your mighty high horse and look at what could get people to migrate from Windows to Linux, it will never happen. I don't care if it is Ubuntu, or Suze, or Red Hat, or whatever. Just have one damn version and make the damn thing work for the latest technology...

You seem to be labouring under the misconception that the free software/open source communities see world domination or the destruction of Microsoft as an ultimate goal.

"you Linux people" are a disparate group of loosely connected individuals, pursuing their own goals and agendas. The only people interested in world domination in my experience are disgruntled Windows users and a fringe minority - not the software developers.

Re:In fact...

[sethadam1]

Everyone has converged to the Red Hat family, the Debian/Ubuntu family, SuSe, Mandrake and Gentoo.

Although Debian and Ubuntu are kind of two separate codebases now. Oh yeah, and can't forget Slackware. And of course, the source based distros. And Crux and Arch, they each have some unique stuff. Plus, Xandros is kind of its own thing now, based on Corel. Yeah, some things are based on, say, Knoppix, which is an offshoot from Debian, but I don't see how that is the "same" once they are binary incompatible.

That makes almost 10 trees from which to branch. How is that converging?

Natural selection

[Red Flayer]

"He was particularly disdainful of acquiring other distributions for the sake of protecting or expanding market share. "We have zero ambition to do that," he said. 'I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection.'""

Very good point he makes, but it only works with OSS. If he needed to acquire functional IP through business acquisitions, then the Red Hat development plan would begin looking like the MS development plan of the early 90s.

The problem with applying natural selection to Liux distros is that the distros will evolve to fill niches. If mass adoption of Linux to compete with Windows is the goal, then the natural selection model fails... people will choose what works best for them, not what is best for everyone in the long run.

In addition, natural selection does not necessarily lead to what is best for the consumer in general. It sounds nice in theory, but a species on top will do its best to hold down the up-and-comers, thus inhibiting the "natural" part of the selection process.

Consolidation thru package management

[gmuslera]

There are a lot of debian/apt based distributions where you can almost mix and match sources and repositories between those distributions... is not a consolidation, but Ubuntu, debian, knoppix based and even commercial ones are getting some sort of common backbone thanks to this.

In RPM land, things are not so clear, as is a bit more rare than an RPM for a distribution works in another, but opening distributions also generate a lot of subdistributions that aggrupates a bit a lot of distros, like all fedora-based ones or the future ones that could be based in opensuse.

I think that is ok that we have a lot of distributions with its own view on how to be installed and somewhat administrated, but could be confusing to have a separate packages for all and each distribution.

Consolidation = eugenics ?

[Spy der Mann]

Guys, think about this. In genetics, Natural selection does its work but it takes millions of years to reach improvements. What mankind has done (i.e. for breeding dog races, or mixing crops of wheat, etc) is to take the best, mix them, and see which ones work or not.

I think a similar effort should be done regarding linux distros. "Accelerate evolution", so to speak.

I've also noticed that the discrepancies between distros can be classified in the following categories:

* Installer
* Windows manager (GNOME,KDE)
* Configuration tools
* Bundled software

In some distros, i.e. ubuntu hoary, the configuration tools depend on GNOME. If I switch to KDE or other WM, they're no longer available (or maybe they are, but not automatically and transparently).

So, if we make these independent from each other, the distro evolution might get a boost, so we could end up with a "meta-distro" where you can only change some parameters in the installation, and everything will still work as planned.

But then again, i'm no Linux expert, these are just my 2c.

Re:Incumbent disparages competitor's products

[LnxAddct]

Well considering how much younger Red Hat is than Novell and the fact that Red Hat focuses soley on linux where as Novell has its hands in many markets and still Red Hat's market capitalization is around a billion more than Novell's says something. Novell has consistently been underperforming in the market for a few quarters now. There is serious mismanagement in that company. The distribution is great, but most of its greatness is still from the prior owners. There is lots of speculation about Novell being bought out or revamping management and direction. Last time they were doing poorly, they switched directions into Linux, if they change management again, they may move into a different direction. Novell is still feeling out the market and deciding how to best make money. They have a few customers in Europe, but other than that it seems most people are going with Red Hat or < insert alternative >. This isn't meant to start a distro war, but this is the way business is going. Its not a bad thing, Red Hat has done a ton for the community and pays some of the best hackers in OSS. This is just the way things go down.
Regards,
Steve

Re:In fact...

[milimetric]

See, that's exactly what I thought as an outsider comin to Linux. I tried all those, literally in the order you mention them:

Red Hat didn't work on my laptop. Ubuntu worked but ran into libc dependency problems when upgrading my system. Suse I actually didn't try but assumed it was the same as Red Hat. Mandrake was nice but didn't really work with all the packages I wanted and for the life of me could not get sound or video to work on my laptop. Gentoo was awesome. Everything worked, hand configed by yours truly now becoming non-noobish. Until I tried to upgrade gcc because I needed some iPod tools and they in turn needed the new gcc. Then all went to shit.

BUT get this, I'm still usin Linux and it's one of the distros you forgot. You guessed it: Slackware. WHY? Because it just works. Handle all dependencies on your own as easily as it is to install something in windows. That's what distros should aspire to. Oh god, no, not being LIKE windows, but having the apparent EASE OF USE of windows.

So in conclusion, Slackware rocks, all the others rock less to none. FlameWAAAAR

a game company could

[zogger]

or a cartel of game companies could collaborate on one linux distro, decide that was the "one true OS" they would develop for in the troika of MS, Mac and 'other' ", and do all their games on that platform. Or say office (OO.org) could decide to release an integrated OS with their product and perhaps a few more critical business apps.

Besides that, yep, even the big hardware vendors are sorta screwed, as releasing "linux" just means WAY too many different things, so mostly except for professionally administered servers they go "this just ain't happening" for a "the masses" guy machine with linux pre installed, and I can see their point on that. Nothing to pick with an assurance that you as the vendor haven't picked "wrong". It's too big a gamble. There are a few exceptions now obviously, but still..the bulk of the market for the alternative desktop/OS will continue to be marginalized from mass divergence, "me too"ism with marginal distro du juor, and lack of agreed upon standards.

HOWEVER...yes, if there was at least a mainstream accepted way to package a kernel of choice with a package of apps of choice, so that it didn't matter what distro you were using, then perhaps it could go forward faster.

I think either consolidate, OR make it excrutiatingly easy for "the masses" guy to build his own on demand, and linux become known as the "have it your way, because that's the only way" operating system. That would mean dumping all the current distros and just concentrating on kernel and packages and put the convergence efforts on standardizing the way packages and apps are pushed, perhaps source based only, get rid of debs/RPMS and assorted whatnot completely.

Re:Natural Selection Naturally Includes Them Too

[LnxAddct]

A) Red Hat had an oppurtunity to buy Suse first (and they had plenty of money to do so), but they declined because they honest to god believe that competition is good.

B) Red Hat's management is open source to the core, if you've ever followed their blogs, or speeches then its pretty evident this isn't just a sham.

C) Red Hat manages GCC, glibc, commits more kernel code than any other entity, is now the core entity behind Gnome, has committed large portions of code to Apache. They've given us Cygwin, GFS, worked with the NSA to integrate SELinux into the kernel, gave us a Directory Server and many many more things. OSS in its current state would be screwed without a big presence like Red Hat. The only reason half of the enterprise features exist in the kernel is from Red Hat. Red Hat does full testing on the kernel. Many OSS projects have such a great reputation for fast patches, a large portion of those patches come from Red Hat.

D) In 16-24 months, Fedora gained more servers according to Netcraft than Novell's Suse. It is a very good product.

E) Novell just got on the Linux train. Despite that they have their hands in many markets, as opposed to Red Hat who depends on Linux to succeed, Red Hat's market capitalization is still over 1 billion dollars higher. Novell is highly mismanaged, and many are speculating that they either are going to get bought, or go through a major management revampment. That revampment could very well include selling off Suse and moving to a different market like they've done many times before. If its not making them enough money, Novell moves on. Red Hat has motivation to keep Linux strong. Novell has been underperforming for a few quarters now and if they keep at this pace they are going to be bankrupt.

You don't give Red Hat enough credit and assume that simply because they are a corporation that they are automatically doing everything with evil intentions. They have very intelligent and deicated folks working there. Literally some of the biggest names in OSS are on their payroll.
Regards,
Steve