Red Hat: Walking the Linux tightrope

By splitting off Fedora, you angered some elements of the open-source community. It almost seems as though Novell is doing a better job of marrying the proprietary and open-source worlds…
Red Hat's software technology is 100 percent open source. If you want to put us in a box, then the most obvious box is that Red Hat only, exclusively sells and supports open source -- GPL'd software. I would characterise Novell as a proprietary company that is deploying on an open-source platform and therefore has an open-source strategy.

IBM helped Red Hat get on its feet, but now they see you as a potential threat. What's your response to the claims that IBM invested in Novell/Suse to put competitive pressure on Red Hat?
SuSE did extremely well on all the IBM platforms: they are in on the S390, they are in on the Zseries, they're in on the P-series. OK, how much money do they make from those lines? Almost nothing, right? IBM loves it. They have got SuSE doing their Linux development. Red Hat does some, but we made some strategic decisions and only do that where we think its right for open-source technology. There is no such thing as a free lunch in this case. The price IBM paid was $50m. Think of it as a long-term subsidy for all the work that had come before. They had to feed that into the programme to keep it breathing because they like having choice. Who doesn't?

Then comes the other complaint: we are trying to become the Microsoft of Linux. We can never, ever be that. Our model means that no one will ever extort the kind of money Microsoft has been able to get. It just can't happen, it's just not possible. There won't ever be another Microsoft, and there definitely won't be a Microsoft of Linux.

We believe, genuinely, that the stuff we develop, the way we engage all of these open-source projects, is part of a long-term plan. We know that any changes we make will be part of the long-term kernel development process. In a year, there is going to be a new version of the kernel coming out, and all of our features and changes will be in it. SuSE, like it or not, makes decisions that help to drive the IBM platform, which is great. But the risk is that you build custom patches and custom changes that go into their own development chains, but they will never make it back into the main Linux. So in two, three years they will still be supporting what I call dead-end patches at a great expense. It is not a good, sustainable model, in my opinion. They are very smart capable people, but we have a different approach.

How do you balance the competing pressures of the market and the open-source community -- both with their own agendas, but both vital to your business model?
People in Red Hat value freedom and courage. They take risks. They value freedom as a principle. Quite frankly, if tomorrow we decided to release a closed piece of software, literally half the engineers would quit on principal that day. But at the same time, as an organisation and as a business, we embrace accountability. We can provide that balance that says, at the same time someone can be free to voice their opinions and make choices about technology, but we have to be accountable to customers. Shareholders have invested boatloads of money in Red Hat and expect performance and payback. But it is a balance.

A lot of our engineers wear Birkenstocks to work, and their favourite T-shirt each day of the week and, on other hand, they like to get paid. They respect the fact that we do sell, and we have lots of constituencies that buy from us. We have to serve our customers' needs, and if we don't do that well, we go bankrupt. It is an interesting balance.