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Red Hat Software Businesses Linux Business

Interview with Red Hat's New CEO 129

mjasay writes "Red Hat just got a new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, but based on a recent CNET interview with him, he's cut from the same cloth as Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's former CEO. He won't buy an iPod because it won't play Ogg Vorbis files. He refused other CEO roles because he 'must have a mission.' He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business. And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million. It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses, according to Whitehurst."
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Interview with Red Hat's New CEO

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  • by 427_ci_505 ( 1009677 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @06:41PM (#21916304)
  • by mwilliamson ( 672411 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @06:50PM (#21916450) Homepage Journal
    Hey Jim, you can play ogg vorbis on an Ipod, so fear not. You just need to replace its built-in O/S with Linux first. Rockbox [rockbox.org] makes this possible, and easy to do. http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005957 [linuxjournal.com]
  • by Neil Hodges ( 960909 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @06:55PM (#21916522)
    Umm, RockBox isn't Linux. It does share some code with iPL, but it isn't a Linux derivative itself, though it does give the iPod the ability to play more formats than Apple does. Unfortunately, RockBox doesn't run on the 6G iPod Classic, 2G or later Nano, nor the iPod Touch. I got the 5G Video after the 6G was released, and on clearance from the somewhat-local Apple Store.
  • by bot24 ( 771104 ) <slashdot.bot24@ig3@net> on Friday January 04, 2008 @06:58PM (#21916570) Homepage
    Rockbox does play Ogg Vorbis(and Speex) but is not Linux. There is iPod Linux if you really want Linux on your iPod.
  • by quintesse ( 654840 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @07:23PM (#21916658)
    No, actually it's the other way around, that's why all 3rd party RedHat/Fedora repositories have already switched to the yum format years ago.
  • by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @07:54PM (#21916980)
    I just wanted to know whether he'd switch Redhat to apt and .deb in the near future

    Why would he do that? RPM has many more features, more of an industry standard, etc and yum has just as many features as apt including some apt doesn't have. There is a yum is faster and uses cache just like apt and even has plugins like fast mirror. A yum update takes me 3 seconds across several different repositories. like adobe, livna, updates and kernel mods so the speed is not a problem either like 90% of other distro users still believe.
    I really hope that people get with the new decade and see RPM's are just fine since 10 years ago when you tried installing gimp.suse.rpm on a redhat box.
  • by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @07:55PM (#21917008) Homepage
    Actually devices that you can put the alternative Rockbox firmware [rockbox.org] on them do support OGG. This includes Sansa, Archos, iRiver, Cowon and others.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05, 2008 @12:44AM (#21919390)

    I looked into buying the RH supported version of JBoss recently. The LOWEST priced supported version is $2000 per year! I'm not exactly sure what market RH is going for here, maybe the Fortune 500 and large institutions, but it sure as hell isn't me.

    I'll stick with the unsupported free version, thanks. I just can't see getting $2000/year value for just some extra support I'll likely never use anyway.


    And that pretty much sums up the dilemna of open source.

    $2000 per year for some kind of basic
    support for an application server is *cheap*.
    Especially when you take into account that
    the open source software (JBoss in this case)
    has little or no revenue from software sales, and thus
    the support revenue has to cover both
    the development cost and the cost of support.
    Red Hat is a company, which has paid employees.
    Red Hat is not somebody doing something in their
    spare time just for the fun of it.

    Yes, they have to charge you, to something
    like the tune of $400 per hour. That, of course,
    is very disgusting, and much too expensive, for somebody who is
    doing something in their spare time just for the fun of it.

    Thomas

  • by McDutchie ( 151611 ) on Saturday January 05, 2008 @01:44AM (#21919750) Homepage

    In response to your comment about KDE there is a very good reason that RedHat use Gnome by default (IMHO): It is more like windows.

    The problem with KDE is that the people who design the interface refuse to acknowledge that Windows is what everyone is used to and you need to make the transition away from that as easy as possible. Gnome has certain key features (like cut and paste) that are as close to the windows functionality as possible.

    You have it exactly backwards. GNOME's user interface has become more and more like Mac OS X in several important ways, like the file chooser dialog, spatial file manager, program menu at the top of the screen, etc. etc. while KDE emulates Windows in just about every way (except it adds a bunch of features Windows doesn't have).

    And where on earth did you get the mistaken idea that KDE does not support Windows-style cut and paste? It always has.

    No, the real reason GNOME is dominant in business-oriented distributions is GTK's more liberal licensing: LGPL instead of Qt's GPL/commercial dual licensing. That means you can make a GTK/GNOME-based commercial, closed-source product without having to buy a license from the GUI toolkit's maker. With Qt and hence with KDE, that is not possible.

THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE

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