RHX: Slowly but surely
RHX (Red Hat Exchange) has not taken over the world just yet, notes Ashlee Vance of The Register. Quite fair, and quite true. Ashlee talked with people from the uber-Linux geek camp and drew some blank stares when he asked about RHX.
But this was never intended to be the audience for RHX, as Matt Mattox of Red Hat explains:
The initial focus was on North American small businesses. To our pleasant surprise, we are seeing businesses of all sizes. There's one evaluation underway, for example, for tens of thousands of users.
Alfresco has an evaluation underway that looks like the one Matt references, but it's possible that others have, too. (Zimbra, perhaps?) At any rate, we've been happy with RHX - we expected it to get traction slowly, and it has actually been better than expected. As Red Hat and its partners invest more marketing dollars into it, I suspect it will only get better.
Even The Register seems optimistic, which is saying something.... :-)
We remain bullish about Red Hat's long-term prospects with RHX. Lord knows the open source crowd could use some organization around the myriad applications that have forced their way into data centers. The project, however, does seem a bit risky for the ISVs in that Red Hat could end up owning the direct line to their customers and would dominate the main open source software marketplace.
Good points. It will be interesting to see how Red Hat answers them.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The open source community really doesn?t need another arena for projects to live and be downloaded from. There are plenty of players in this space (Sourceforge, Apache, Google, Codehaus, etc.). RHX isn't intended to drive 1M downloads a day, or hundreds of project ratings. These are functions that developers generally do. Enterprise buyers and decision makers are less likely (not unlikely) to play this role.
As I see it, RHX is intended to serve the needs of an enterprise decision maker that is already using RHEL and wonders: "okay Red Hat, what else do you recommend I try?" or "what CRM app should I use with RHEL?" Try answering either of these questions at sourceforge.