Red Hat

Red Hat chairman prescribes open source to solve state's economic woes

Once a missionary, always a missionary.

That's the thought I had while reading Red Hat chairman Matthew Szulik's recent op-ed piece on improving North Carolina's economic competitiveness. Szulik, who led Red Hat for over a decade, was known for an almost evangelical zeal for open source.

I found it inspirational; Red Hat competitors found it unsettling.

It's perhaps not surprising that Szulik is still preaching the open-source gospel, this time to his home state of North Carolina. Seeking to rejuvenate his state's financial prospects, Szulik "demand[s] new and innovative strategies from our elected … Read more

Linux a recession winner, IDC finds

Linux long ago became the "furniture" of open source: essential infrastructure to most of the Fortune 500 and somewhat mundane in its predictable, ever-increasing adoption.

Despite its impressive rise, however, Linux still has a long, long way to go. While results of an IDC survey published this week found that 55 percent of the 300 IT executives surveyed already had Linux systems in use, a full 97 percent were running Windows.

Linux, in other words, still has a long way to go to reach full adoption and, importantly, the vendors that sell it have even further to go … Read more

Cisco declares war, embraces open source

Cisco Systems doesn't seem to know how to color inside the lines.

The networking-equipment giant has been foraging in a diverse set of new markets lately, taking on Microsoft in the collaboration and unified-communications markets, but now sticking a finger in the eye of longtime server partners Hewlett-Packard and IBM by jumping into the server market, as The New York Times reports.

Is Cisco reckless, or simply smart?

Whichever the case may be, Cisco just took on a host of powerful competitors. All at once. Sun Microsystems' Zack Urlocker notes that Sun, among others, is jumping into Cisco's profitable network equipment market. … Read more

Red Hat and patents: Much ado about nothing

Slashdot has been set alight with the sensationalist proposition that Red Hat may be applying for non-defensive patents, despite its stated policy of only seeking patents for defensive purposes. Ironically, some are pointing to Red Hat's interoperability deal with Microsoft, which specifically and emphatically stressed that it steered clear of the same patent minefields that plagued Novell's deal with Microsoft.

This is ridiculous. Red Hat has never varied from its free-software ideals. Some people are so determined to think the worst of Microsoft that they unreasonably devise conspiracy theories for any person or company that has the slightest … Read more

Oracle: If RHEL were free, we wouldn't compete

In the midst of an otherwise insightful analysis of Oracle's contributions to the Linux kernel (spoiler: they're significant), Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's vice president of Linux engineering, makes this baffling statement:

We're offering (Oracle Unbreakable Linux) only because Red Hat requires customers to pay for binary downloads of (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). If RHEL was free, we would have never done (Oracle Unbreakable Linux).

Let me get this straight. If Red Hat would just give away its product for free (as in price, source code, etc.), Oracle would be happy to not try to compete with Red … Read more

Red Hat joins the elite...by getting sued

In technology, the best indication that you've "arrived" as a company is when you get hit by a patent infringement suit. By this measure, Red Hat, which was just hit by a patent-infringement suit from little-known Software Tree, is ready to join an elite circle of premier software vendors like IBM, Microsoft, and HP, each of which spends a lot of time and money defending against patent lawsuits.

Congratulations, Red Hat. Doesn't it feel great?

This isn't, of course, the first lawsuit that Red Hat has faced. Firestar, IP Innovation, and DataTern have also launched lawsuits against Red Hat, … Read more

The 'Linux desktop' heads for the cloud

While evangelists of Linux distributions built for personal computers (i.e., "Linux desktops") point to Netbooks as an indication of renewed life in their chances to compete for consumers, new data suggests that this may be a fool's hope.

Instead, such advocates would do well to follow the leads of Canonical and Red Hat, as they respectively extend the desktop with cloud services and deliver desktop functionality from the cloud.

Although it's true that roughly 30 percent of Dell Inspiron 9s Netbooks run Ubuntu Linux, it's equally true that about 90 percent of Netbooks run … Read more

Red Hat and IBM faring best in a bad economy

While checking stock prices this afternoon, it quickly became apparent that the recession is not punishing all stocks equally.

In a year that has seen the Dow Jones Industrial Average take a 45 percent haircut, some stocks are swimming upstream in a difficult market. Others, however, are flailing.

The 52-week returns on a range of stocks hint at where buyers are putting their dollars in a tight economy:

Red Hat: down 20 percent Sun: down 72 percent Apple: down 27 percent Oracle: down 20 percent Novell: down 56 percent IBM: down 21 percent Microsoft: down 40 percent Adobe: down 51 … Read more

How to grow your business in Latin America

As the developed economies crater, many vendors are looking beyond the borders of North America and Western Europe to grow into Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

For open-source companies, in particular, Latin America shows a great deal of promise, as countries such as Brazil and Argentina deliver many leads--but to too few closed contracts.

Over the past three years, part of my role has included managing Alfresco's business in Latin America. In so doing, I have sought expert advice from Red Hat, which has a booming business in Latin America, and other trusted sources. This weekend, however, I … Read more