The open source techie who means business

...the same issue — at the moment people are adding new things so any contribution is a positive improvement, but over time random changes could make it worse.

Many kernel developers work for companies nowadays, for example lead kernel maintainers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton work for OSDL, while you work for Red Hat. How many independent kernel developers are their nowadays?
Probably not that many. There are some students who do work on the kernel. One thing that drives students to work on the kernel is that it offers good job prospects — if you're a good kernel developer, you'll soon get emails from large companies offering you a job.

What I think is interesting about the kernel development process, unlike some other projects such as Debian, is that there is no formal process for becoming a developer. Isn't it risky that anyone can get involved and change the code?
There is a lot of control and review — every bit of code has been read by several people. We don't have a formal process for training developers, but there are things that have been done, such as the kernel newbies project, which is a way for people to learn how things get done. Or the kernel janitors project, where people work on small things, such as cleanups and reviewing code.

If some random person makes a change to the kernel, we will get somebody to review it. We get a lot of people who make just one change and we never hear from them again, for example, they install Linux and discover their USB stick doesn't work, so they fix that. Having a formal process would be negative thing as it would stop people from making such contributions. The people who make one-line contributions are clearly very good developers, they're just not kernel developers.

In August 2003 you took a one year sabbatical to work on an MBA . Why did you decide to do an MBA? Is it finished now?
Engineers look at sales and marketing people and wonder what they do. When I became more senior in the company [Red Hat] I needed to talk more to sales people and had to understand what they were doing.

I worked part-time on the masters over a year, and have now finished it. I've only just got the results for the research part of my Masters, which investigated Linux on the desktop, and I'll be publishing this fairly soon.

So, what were your findings?
It's starting to happen — people are deploying it, particularly in environments where there where computers are only being used for basic word processing. Thin client Linux is being deployed a lot, for example, at call centres and hotels. Large companies are in some ways finding it easier to switch — smaller companies have less technical people and tend to run more applications on one machine.

The French tax agency plans to deploy the OpenOffice.org on 80,000 PCs, but hasn't yet decided whether it will migrate to Linux afterwards. How important do you think OpenOffice is in promoting the use of Linux on the desktop?
A lot of people that I talk to who have been doing migrations to Linux, started using OpenOffice on Windows. For some people that's their only migration — OpenOffice saves them a fortune. It's a big first starting step and is a very important application for Linux on the desktop.