Red Hat: There's still room for improvement

So do your subscriptions cost less in developing nations?
Depending upon the market and the opportunity, I think we price according to the competition.

Microsoft is spending a lot of effort cultivating good relations with overseas governments. Also, there's a move by some governments to support homegrown versions of Linux.
We're certainly staffing up internationally. We just recently hired the IBM sales director for Asia-Pacific who has joined Red Hat to head up our Asia-Pacific operations. In certain markets, you can't (use) the broad brush. The Korea marketplace has a dominant Unix theme to it and a non-Windows theme. This is a different market relationship, of course, to China, which is different, of course, to Japan. So you need to really look at these marketplaces very independently. Malaysia, for example, has a very different set of opportunities than perhaps Japan does, you know. But for a young, growing company, these are all enormous challenges, there are issues of localisation, there are issues of culture, there are issues of pricing.

Do you think that Red Hat's benefiting from anti-Americanism to some degree? Even though you are an American company, the Red Hat logo goes a long way in many different countries.
Anti-Americanism has more causes than computing software. There are some very, very key drivers that haven't changed about why you see international markets accepting open-source software. First of all, they want a choice. Second, they want the flexibility to be able to use software products on their terms and make modifications without the threat and intimidation of legal action.

As a result, we are starting to see a younger user of software and the development of a competency at a much younger age of scientific and technical and computer science learning and aptitude. I believe that those are the compelling reasons.

When it comes to security, do you think Linux is going to have to fend off more attacks in the next year?
I think that Linux is rapidly evolving to becoming a much more robust, much more secure environment than it was the year before… But I wouldn't want to self incriminate myself and say, "Oh, it's going to be bulletproof" and all of a sudden turn all the [hackers] loose on us.

What are the big challenges confronting Red Hat and the open-source movement?
I think the new challenges and issues that will be placed in front of us will be around patent and copyright.

What specifically?
It's no secret that Red Hat and the open-source community for some time have challenged what we think is a patent process that needs review and further circumspection. We would not want to see the current patent law be applied to future and new jurisdictions. We think copyright in this country is currently misplaced.

What points would you have the courts throw out?
One of the most fundamental issues is that of full disclosure as it relates to a software submission. When you apply for a patent...you can only deliver a subset of the source code or intellectual property that you are looking to receive a patent on and not the full disclosure in its entirety...If the real issue is trademark or trade secret, then apply for trade secret protection. But right now, the issues of copyright and trade secret protection are somewhat mushed together.

I think there are some smart people in the administration and the government challenging some of those historical assumptions. So much of the world's economy right now has been moving in this transition from analogue to digital. But some of the [copyright rulings] that were made over the last 100 years go all the way back to John Phillips Souza. It's time for changes.

Are there other [international] jurisdictions you examined where you concluded that was the better way?
Well, I think the most important thing that we want to do is continue to inspire the public debate because that really hasn't happened. When President Bush took office, he talked about really challenging the whole US [Patent and Trademark Office] and try to create global standards. What we want to make sure is that the small guy, like a Red Hat, has the same opportunity to compete in the public debate as the larger companies that are increasingly competing based on their lobbying influence with the size of their leverage in Washington D.C.

Such as?
There are some smart, larger companies than Red Hat.