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Q&A: Red Hat CEO Robert Young
(09/30/98 4:18 p.m. ET) By John Borland, TechWeb The Linux operating system got a ringing endorsement from the corporate world this week, when Intel and Netscape announced investments in Red Hat Software, a Durham, N.C., company that produces the leading commercial version of the open source software. The companies did not release financial details of the deal.
The company's CEO, Robert Young, says Red Hat will now have access to the same prerelease information Intel shares with other OS vendors, giving Red Hat a significant advantage over the rest of the Linux community. TechWeb Internet's John Borland asked Young what the investments mean to Red Hat and the rest of the Linux community.
What it does is open doors to us that were previously very difficult to open on our own as a small company.
With Intel, Linux was always very effective. Our open-development model, where all of our users can help us build technology, has enabled Red Hat Linux to run on more PC hardware than anything but Windows 95. It even runs on more PC hardware than NT, for that matter. The problem is most of the binary-only, proprietary OSes have been working with Intel on a preannouncement basis, so that when new hardware comes out, the other OSes have had a head start on Linux. We catch up very quickly, but they've had a head start. And that will change as a result of this announcement.
It's going to depend on the situation, on the technology, and on the permissions that Intel is prepared to live with. At the very least, it means all of the other Linux vendors will get those technologies or that information no later than the announcement date of the new technology.
The only thing I will say is that it's sort of approaching the issue from the wrong angle. While it's certainly fun and sporting to watch the competition between the various players in the information industries, the key issue is what are the users getting out of this? Are the users benefiting or not benefiting? I don't expect Microsoft to go away any time soon, and hopefully, the best-case scenario is where the user benefits. Microsoft users will benefit because we push Microsoft into building better technologies, and conversely, our users benefit because Microsoft pushes us into building better technologies.
The short answer is, we've got our work cut out for us. We've just swung these doors open wide and created huge opportunities for ourselves out of this particular announcement, as well as some of the others from Oracle and Informix and all those characters. So we've got our work cut out. We've got a lot of work to do just do deliver on the expectations we are creating. We intend to focus and deliver very effectively for the Linux user community, but also for the much broader enterprise-user community, who are now going to be deploying Linux solutions.
Having said that, in order to provide enterprise-level support services, there is a big up-front investment that we have to make. And that is what the money will absolutely allow us to do.
MCI WorldCom Exec On Linux: Not So Fast
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