Underexposed

Open-source fans can be a skeptical bunch, but I've seen their collective opinions shift--for example in the gradually diminishing loathing for Sun Microsystems as that company stopped deriding Linux and started moving its portfolio to open-source software.

So it's not a surprise that various representatives had a mixed reaction to Microsoft's move Thursday to share details of its technology with open-source programmers.

The move could make it easier for many projects to work well with Microsoft products and potentially replace them--for example the Thunderbird e-mail software could communicate better with Microsoft Exchange servers and also displace Microsoft Outlook on PCs. But Microsoft also made it clear that a pledge not to sue open-source programmers only applied in "non-commercial" contexts, so open-source fans didn't get everything they want.

And even though Microsoft said it now will share the specific list of patents it says it has on technology it wants to license to others--something open-source fans have sought once Microsoft asserted last year that Linux and other projects violate 235 patents--some see signing licenses as incompatible with open-source license requirements.

For its part, Microsoft is pledging to move beyond its historically adversarial treatment of the open-source realm. "As Microsoft takes this significant step forward into the interconnected world of the future, we aspire to doing so with members of the open source community by our side now and for the long haul," said Bill Hilf, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, on his blog. Hilf previously ran Microsoft's Linux lab and was an Linux deployment specialist at IBM.

I surveyed various companies and individuals about the move and received some other thoughts unsolicited. Here are some reactions:

• Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director: "The world of software development has been marching in a steady direction toward being open and transparent. As Linux's use continues to rise, so does the demand for customers to enable it to interoperate with Microsoft products. This announcement by Microsoft seems to indicate they want to participate in that march. Even if some of the announced details still seem less than ideal for open source developers, at least it's a first step."

• Michael Cunningham, Red Hat's general counsel: "Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today:

"Commit to open standards: Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML, Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization's meeting next week in Geneva...

"Commit to interoperability with open source: Instead of offering a patent license for its protocol information on the basis of licensing arrangements it knows are incompatible with the GPL (General Public License)--the world's most widely used open source software license--Microsoft should extend its Open Specification Promise to all of the interoperability information that it is announcing today will be made available...

"Commit to competition on a level playing field: Microsoft's announcement today appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open-source community. How else can you explain a 'promise not to sue open-source developers' as long as they develop and distribute only 'non-commercial' implementations of interoperable products? This is simply disingenuous."

• Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project and a Novell programmer working on Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software: "As a chess move, it is a fascinating one...On the surface it looks very good. (There are) lots of things that we want to interoperate with--Office, SQL Server, SharePoint. Getting the documentation to everyone sounds great, and it seems like they are serious about doing more interoperability work...When the full list for patents becomes available, the question is what will open-source vendors do if they find pieces that have historically infringed: will they choose to license and be the recipients of the community wrath, or will they hold their grounds and risk a lawsuit?"

• Jeremy Allison, a founder of the Samba open-source project: "The devil is in the details. If they can follow through with this, the world will be a better place...It doesn't mean any change for us (Samba) as we already had all these documents, and the promise not to sue is only for 'non-commercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless. At least everyone now gets access to the same info, which I'm very happy about. Hey, should we ask for our money back ? :-)."

• Matt Asay, vice president of business development for Alfresco and a writer for CNET's Blog Network: "The really big news is Microsoft's commitment to open APIs (application programming interfaces) and open protocols...It's great news, and it's big news. My company has been seeking this API and protocol information for months (years, really). But Microsoft's pledge doesn't obviate the need to negotiate patent royalties, if required, with the company."

• Andi Gutmans, a co-founder of Zend: "I have no doubt Microsoft is doing the right thing for their business. I believe Microsoft has finally understood that their closed nature has significantly hindered the growth of their ecosystem...Microsoft has had a strong Microsoft-centric ecosystem, but going down this path they are able to extend their applicable market beyond today's reach...I believe the PHP community can only benefit from this move. With PHP being a heterogeneous solution which works on pretty much any operating system, any database and any Web Server; the more interoperability capabilities it has with all open-source and proprietary solutions the better...Microsoft's all or nothing approach has been an accelerator for the adoption of open-source operating systems. While I am a big fan of Linux, I do believe that this is going to put an increasing amount of pressure on the Linux/Unix backers to deliver innovation and value on top of these systems."

Novell has endowed its OpenSuse Build Service with the ability to produce software for its main rival, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a clone called CentOS, the company said Thursday.

The build system was originally established so programmers could make sure their software works on new versions of Novell's Suse Linux products. The build system already worked with two other Linux distributions, Debian and Ubuntu.

Why the largesse from Novell?

My guess is that the company hopes to tow more open-source developers into its orbit, but there are altruistic motives as well: "By adding support to build packages for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the OpenSuse Build Service makes it even easier to build packages across multiple Linux distributions, thus further enabling innovative ideas to spread quickly throughout the free and open source software community," said Michael Loeffler, Novell's OpenSuse product manager, in a statement.

Red Hat's new CEO, Jim Whitehurst

(Credit: Red Hat)

Some folks paused when they heard an airline executive was taking over as Red Hat's new chief executive. But Jim Whitehurst thinks his job as Delta Air Lines' chief operating officer will serve him in good stead.

In an interview Friday, the 40-year-old said he believes his experience running much of a 50,000-person company and focusing on top priorities will serve the Linux seller well as it tries to increase revenue.

Whitehurst also has at least a touch of the open-source zeal of his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, who left the CEO job January 1 because of family medical difficulties but who remains chairman of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company. Whitehurst has been a Linux user since the Slackware days of the mid-1990s, and he's already got the open-source sales pitch down pat.

He faces plenty of challenges, to be sure. The integration of the JBoss Java server software has been a rocky process, Red Hat has no shortage of competitors--some of them also close allies--and Whitehurst will have to make the abrupt shift from Delta Air Lines' bankruptcy-induced bunker mentality to the growth challenges of Red Hat.

But Whitehurst seemed nothing if not game in a conversation today. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

How did you first hear about this Red Hat job?
Whitehurst: It was from a recruiter, a cold call from Nosal Partners. I was thrilled and basically said, "When can I get up there?" (Red Hat Chairman) Matthew (Szulik) and I met early on a Sunday morning two days later. We hit it off well.

What was your first reaction when you heard about Red Hat? Was it "Who?" or was it "This is the opportunity I've been waiting for"?
Whitehurst: It was "This is the opportunity I've been waiting for." I've used Linux since the mid- to late 1990s at home. I screwed around with Red Hat since before the enterprise version and it was free. I've been using Fedora for quite awhile. I'm very familiar with the products and the company. As my wife said, it was the first thing I came home with absolutely lit up about.

Why did you leave Delta?
Whitehurst: I was COO at Delta throughout the bankruptcy. Delta emerged in May, and I was the leading internal candidate to be CEO. The new board of directors decided to go outside. I don't have any issues with that. When the new CEO came in, frankly, the entire company other than finance reported to me, and it wasn't reasonable for him to come in and have one report. He needed a wide berth. We agreed it would be a good thing for me to go for him to be able to take the reins fully. It was very amicable.

When you look at Delta vs. Red Hat, there's a dramatic difference in business models. Should your employees, customers, and investors be concerned that somebody from an old-line industry is taking over at a software company with a fairly revolutionary business model?
Whitehurst: I don't think so. I'm now a Red Hat shareholder. I do think I bring a set of skills that will augment skills here. As a large customer of technology at Delta, I think have a good sense of what CIOs look for. Airlines in general are very reliant on technology, so having a customer perspective can be very helpful. This company has massive opportunity. One of the big issues is how to scale the company. I bring some big-company process skills to ensure this company has the capability to grow from $500 million to $5 billion (in annual revenue) and continue to run smoothly and to offer excellent service.

Another parallel is that airlines have very low barriers to entry. The way the established companies have developed is they're not particularly customer-friendly. No one talks about their wonderful airline experiences. A thrilling thing about Red Hat is that with open source, we don't have big barriers to entry, and it's a chance to define a company around customer service. We'd better never lose our focus on the customer, because you can't lose it and get it back. That's why I feel good about competing against the proprietary-software guys. Service used to be an afterthought, it was the hassle that you had to do if you wanted to sell the next version of your software.

Where did Delta use Red Hat software and where did it not?
Whitehurst: I want to be a little careful because I don't know what Delta has disclosed. There are some specific systems there that ran on Red Hat, some pretty big mission-critical pieces of software.

Is it fair to say it wasn't the core of the operation?
Whitehurst: The core of the systems were the old original TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) systems that have been around forever--the things the airlines know they'll have to migrate off of over time. But while we were all bleeding was not the time to do it.

You talked about being able to scale Red Hat. Red Hat has grown a lot, but the big software IPO in 2007 was VMware, which has grown a lot more and a lot faster. It seems like proprietary software isn't dead yet.
Whitehurst: I don't think proprietary software is dead by any stretch of the imagination. But a couple comments. One thing we'll talk about in early days is innovation and making sure Red Hat leads innovation and drives innovation in open source. Technology is an industry where there's a massive first-mover advantage. Our virtualization is excellent, but we weren't there first. VMware was and has triple our revenues and a gazillion-dollar market cap. Innovation and being there first are extremely important. We were the first enterprise Linux and we have 80-something percent share of the enterprise Linux market. Being first is important. Making sure Red Hat is a leader in the open-source community, to make sure open source is not only iterating but also innovating, is important.

Szulik had a good soapbox about open-source software. Will you be taking on his evangelism?
Whitehurst: I'm very passionate about open-source. It's a fundamentally better way to develop software. Open source is a truly disruptive technology and will continue to take share and grow. Open source is a good. By us doing well, we're also doing good. Democratizing content and democratizing information has an incredibly important benefit to society, and we play a key role in doing that. Does that make me a zealot or not? I don't know.

Matthew is not going away. He'll continue to work with me and continue to be a key spokesman for open source.

What kind of changes can we expect you to bring to Red Hat? How is your management style different?
Whitehurst: I think he and I share similar traits. I'm very open and informal. It's hard for me to say what changes will come. In terms of strategy, I'm brand new. I will say I have a couple of biases. One is focus, focus, focus. This is a company that is almost encumbered by the opportunities we have. But chasing 1,000 things and doing none of them well won't be good for us or be good for open source. Making sure we nail the three or four things we do and absolutely nail them is going to be critical. You won't see us going into five or six new business, but you will see us redoubling focus on several.

JBoss has been a difficult acquisition. Is this a situation like with (Sun Microsystems CEO) Jonathan Schwartz, where you show up after some of the tough stuff has been fixed and you get to take credit for it, or is this something where there needs to be a lot more work?
Whitehurst: I hope I'm showing up to take credit (laughing). Timing in life is everything. As we talked about the third quarter, we're getting some real momentum with JBoss and very good about it. Clearly that is part of our core and we'll have a lot of focus going forward. Does that mean change or not? I don't know. Things are looking quite good now.

Can we look for a push for JBoss on Windows or on various versions of Unix?
Whitehurst: JBoss runs on Windows now.

Right, but how about a bigger marketing push, for example?
Whitehurst: It's too early for me to start talking about strategy at that level. What I will say is that it's simple. Does it add value to our customers that our customers want? There are two things I'm unwavering about: one is we are open-source and we will continue to be open-source; second, every single decision we make is filtered through "is this adding value for our customers?"

Another possible priority is Linux on the desktop. It's something Red Hat has tried for years to make into a reality. Is that something Red Hat is going to focus on and redouble efforts on, or is it one of the things you're going to let fall by the wayside for a few years?
Whitehurst: Hey, I just found the bathroom and the coffee, so I'm not calling exactly what's in vs. out. That's something that as a management team we'll go through a rigorous process and jointly determine.

There are some obvious competitors out there, like Novell and Microsoft, but I'm more interested the coopetition companies like IBM and Oracle that are both partners and competitors. Do you see those companies more as a long-term threat or long-term ally? IBM has a strong server business and Oracle has a strong database business, but they also have straight-up competing products, and Red Hat is expanding into those companies' turf.
The answer is yes and yes. They are absolutely threats to us, and they are also absolutely partners. The airline industry no different. (Delta) had an alliance with Continental, Northwest, and SkyTeam where we partner in some areas, and we are ferocious, brutal competitors in others. It's the same thing with IBM and Oracle. There is no black and white in this world. It's all shades of gray.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO as of January 1, 2008

(Credit: Delta Airlines)

Michael Tiemann, a Red Hat executive with close to two decades of open-source business experience under his belt, has come to the defense of the company's new chief executive.

Red Hat said last week that Jim Whitehurst, 40, will take over as Red Hat CEO and president on January 1, replacing Matthew Szulik, who's stepping down, though remaining chairman, because of family medical issues. Whitehurst worked at Delta Airlines from 2002 to 2007, rising to the position of chief operating officer.

Tiemann, who's Red Hat's vice president of open-source affairs and who helps to run the Open Source Initiative, said on his blog last week Jim Whitehurst shouldn't be dismissed as inappropriate to run an open-source company by his Delta Airlines stint.

"Jim was an open-source guy before he was an airline guy," Tiemann said. He praised Whitehurst's use of Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 version of Linux on a home machine and many other Linux versions before that and said Whitehurst understands the open-source movement.

"The candidate selected to lead Red Hat does understand these values, as a user, as a coder, as a manager, as a customer, and as an executive. In my opinion he should be marked up, not down, for having had experience beyond just open source," Tiemann said. "What a tragedy it would be to discount all that experience, all that knowledge, all that energy because the executive in question has a day job running a petrochemical company, a manufacturing company, a logistics company, a trading company, a bank, or a national government!"

Tiemann has an interesting history and significant cred in the open-source realm. In 1989, he co-founded Cygnus Solutions, a company that worked on the GCC open-source compiler project. Red Hat acquired Cygnus in 1999, and Tiemann served as Red Hat's chief technology officer for several years before taking his current post running open-source affairs.

Among those who were taken aback by Red Hat's choice of CEO was Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard, who said, "Whitehurst brings a strong operational and strategic track record to the table but lacks direct technology experience. Given the existing strong operating chief financial officer we would have expected a new CEO to have more external product or distribution related experience to help remedy the company's challenges in transitioning from a point Linux operating system provider into a multi-product, open-source infrastructure player."

And Matt Asay, vice president of business development at open-source document management start-up Alfresco (and a CNET blogger), despaired on his blog, "If there was ever an industry that has little to nothing to teach the software industry, it's the airline industry...This change heavily shakes my faith in Red Hat."

After reading Tiemann's post, though, Asay tempered his concerns about whether has Whitehurst has open-source passion. "OK. I'm willing to believe," Asay said.

Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik during a 2005 conference

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The man who led Linux seller Red Hat from a newly public but largely unproven open-source company to a force to be reckoned with is giving his office to an executive largely unknown in the software industry.

In a surprise move, Red Hat said Thursday that Matthew Szulik is as president and chief executive on January 1, to be replaced by James Whitehurst, 40, Delta Air Lines' former chief operating officer.

Szulik, who took over as CEO from Bob Young in 1999 just a few months after its initial public offering, said he's stepping down because of family health issues.

"For the last nine months, I've struggled with health issues in my family," and that priority couldn't be balanced with work, Szulik said in an interview. "This job requires a 7x24, 110 percent commitment."

Szulik, who remains chairman of the board, praised Whitehurst in a statement, saying he's a "hands-on guy who will be a strong cultural fit at Red Hat" and "a talented executive who has successfully led a global technology-focused organization at Delta."

On a conference call, Szulik said Whitehurst stood "head and shoulders" above other candidates interviewed in a recruiting process. He was a programmer earlier in his career and runs four versions of Linux at home, he said.

Moreover, Szulik said he wasn't satisfied with more traditional tech executives who were interviewed.

"What we encountered was in many cases was a lack of understanding of open-source software development and of our model," he said. During the interview, he added about the tech industry candidates, "When you take them out of the big buildings, without the imprimatur of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle, or HP around them, they just didn't hold up."

The surprise move was announced as the leading Linux seller announced results for its third quarter of fiscal 2008. Its revenue increased 28 percent to $135.4 million and net income went up 12 percent to $20.3 million, or 10 cents per share. The company also raised estimates for full-year results to revenue of $521 million to $523 million and earnings of about 70 cents per share.

According to a regulatory filing Thursday, Whitehurst will be paid $700,000 per year with a possible bonus of the same amount. He also will be paid up to $150,000 for relocation from Atlanta, and will be granted options to purchase 500,000 shares of common stock and 175,000 shares of restricted stock.

Whitehurst worked at Delta from 2002 to August 2007; before that, he was at the Boston Consulting Group, Red Hat said.

Red Hat's strategy shift
In his years at Red Hat, Szulik presided over a major change in business strategy. Until 2003, its single product, Red Hat Linux, was freely available as a download, and the company sold technical support. The business depended on converting people who got the free versions into paying customers.

But it changed dramatically to two versions. First came Red Hat Advanced Server, later to become Red Hat Enterprise Linux, available as a support subscription that has to be purchased for each server it runs on. Next was the freely available Fedora, fast-changing, a proving ground for new features before they were fully tested, and coming only with short-term, informal support.

The elimination of the free, supported product angered some--and triggered the eventual founding of rival Ubuntu by Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth. But it's been hard to argue with Red Hat's financial success.

In the quarter ended May 31, 1999, the last before Red Hat's IPO, the company had revenue of $2.7 million. In the most recent, revenue was $135.4 million.

In a parting blog message, Szulik said he's proud of the strides the open-source software movement has made.

"Through our actions, the open source community and the people of Red Hat are defining a modern economic relationship between developer and customer," he said. "Our customers and marketplace are responding, as evidenced by our financials and strong market potential. What was once considered a joke in 1998 no longer is," Szulik said.

Fending off challenges
Szulik has withstood many challenges over the years as his company grew to more than 3,000 employees. Among them:

• Novell's acquisition of Suse Linux, combining a well-known software brand with the second-place Linux version and getting a $50 million investment as an endorsement from IBM. Novell struggled financially since the acquisition, however, though it remains the top Red Hat rival commercially.

• A legal assault on Linux by the SCO Group, a former Linux seller that acquired a disputed amount of the original Unix intellectual property and sued IBM, arguing that Big Blue broke its Unix contract by putting proprietary Unix code into open-source Linux. The court case has largely fallen apart, and SCO is in bankruptcy court.

• The arrival of Oracle's "Unbreakable Linux" initiative, an effort to rebuilt the operating system off Red Hat's publicly available source code and sell support at lower cost. But the database giant hasn't stopped Red Hat's growth, and indeed it was Red Hat, not the database giant, that has remained at the top of the CIO Insight value survey.

• Microsoft's intellectual property challenges. The software colossus has tried castigating the free and open-source programming movement, then tried playing nice for a time, and in 2007 reverted to saber rattling with the threat that Linux customers should pay for the Microsoft patents that Microsoft believes the Linux and related open-source software infringes. So far, the customers keep buying, though Linux hasn't made much of a dent on Microsoft's PC dominance.

• A 2004 earnings restatement in which the company changed its accounting procedures for when it recognized revenue from its subscriptions.

• Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss, which made open-source server software. Red Hat missed financial targets for the acquisition, but in the last quarter it had two JBoss deals worth more than $1 million, Szulik said, and the pipeline for future deals is fuller than it's been.

"The company had to learn how to sell into the application environment. It's a different purchaser of technology," he said of the JBoss software. "There's not the same sense of urgency" compared to operating system purchasing, which often is driven by the purchase of new servers, he said.

Unlike many Linux products that fell by the wayside, Ubuntu remains a rival, but Szulik believes that its sponsor, Canonical, has yet to face the difficult transition into a full-fledged business.

"I think they're a creative packager," Szulik said, referring to the process of gathering and unifying existing open-source products. "There is a big difference in being able to distribute an integrated product for free and getting someone to pay for it. When there is zero expectation of financial remuneration, everything is Hollywood."

Customers who want to try running software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud now can get started.

The leading Linux seller announced Monday that its beta program for the online service is now open to the public. The for-fee program includes email-based support.

Initially, the service will use the latest release of RHEL, version 5.1, but new releases will be issued later, Red Hat said.

The service uses variable pricing, Red Hat said when it announced the service earlier this month. It costs $19 per month plus 21, 53, or 94 cents per hour, depending on computing and storage capacity, plus 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in and 19 cents per gigabyte transferred out.

(Via Matt Asay's The Open Road).

SAN FRANCISCO--Red Hat plans to begin a private beta test of new open-source messaging software next month, hoping to shake up a section of the server market currently dominated by proprietary rivals and give the Linux seller a new revenue source.

Server messaging software's purpose is--bear with me here for a moment--sending messages. That may sound obvious, but doing it reliably and in high volume is essential to large-scale networked business tasks such as trading stocks, where a brokerage that can place buy and sell orders faster than a rival can make real money.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens

(Credit: Red Hat)

Indeed, Red Hat's APQM began its life as proprietary messaging software at financial services giant JP Morgan Chase, said Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens in an interview here during Oracle OpenWorld.

The beta test will involve only 10 to 12 customers and a lot of hand-holding, Stevens said. Red Hat expects to begin selling support subscriptions for the completed software in the first half of 2008, he added.

"We're going to build a subscription around it," Stevens said, adding that it will be integrated with Red Hat's work into fast-response "real-time" operating system technology. At least initially, the messaging subscription won't be included in the regular Red Hat Enterprise Linux support subscription that's the company's financial mainstay, he added.

After acquiring the JP Morgan Chase software, Red Hat made it into an open-source project called Qpid at the Apache Software Foundation, hired programmers to improve it, and joined with networking giant Cisco Systems to try to make the software's mechanisms an industry standard called AMQP, or Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.

That JP Morgan Chase would have to build its own rather than use off-the-shelf products is a telling indicator of the state of the industry, Stevens said, arguing that today's commercial products aren't able to perform well enough. Red Hat's goal, though he wouldn't promise the first version will achieve it, is to enable a server to process 1 million messages per second.

That's roughly five times that of proprietary software such from Tibco and IBM, Stevens said. And although he says his company's goal is to meet customers' demands, Stevens spoke with some relish of the prospect of "collateral damage" that might undermine the proprietary rivals.

Those rivals aren't standing still. IBM last week announced WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging Version 2.0, which the company said could process "millions" of messages per second.

Messaging has been in Red Hat's sights for years. In 2005, Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said messaging is one element of higher-level software where Red Hat could grow beyond its core operating system business.

Stevens has high hopes for AMQP. For one thing, making it a network standard means that companies such as Cisco could accelerate it by intelligently processing address and priority information. For another, Red Hat expects it'll be automatically logged so that message sequences can be replayed if necessary. And keeping records eliminates a need for separate software used for auditing and regulatory compliance, he said.

Several others are joining Red Hat and Cisco in working to make AMQP a standard. Among them are Novell, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Boerse Systems, Goldman Sachs, Iona Technologies, and 29West Inc

"We want to standardize message queuing--to make it as standard as TCP/IP," the network standard that powers the Internet.

Over the years, Red Hat's Fedora has made a name for itself as a version of Linux for enthusiasts, developers, and those who want to try the latest thing in open-source software. But a curious feature of the new version 8, released Thursday, is the ability to strip out the Fedora identity altogether.

The reason: Red Hat wants Fedora to be a foundation for those who want to build their own Linux products on a Fedora foundation. With Fedora 8, that's easier, because all the Fedora-specific elements are wrapped up into one neatly optional package, said project leader Max Spevack.

Red Hat is releasing Fedora 8 Thursday.

(Credit: Phoronix)

"It becomes really easy to have a built-from-Fedora distribution that is branded in your own way," Spevack said.

That re-brandability is notable, given that even in the share-and-enjoy world of open-source software, people can become attached to their brands. But there's something in it for Red Hat, too: a potentially broader community.

Red Hat is vying with Novell's OpenSuse, Canonical's Ubuntu, and others for the attention of developers who can get involved in the project. A Fedora user no doubt is much more likely to become a Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer than the average Linux user. And while Fedora is free, RHEL is available only for a fee.

The ability to "re-spin" Fedora is attracting some interest. Among the Fedora-based variations that will be available are one for gaming, one for designing microprocessors, and one for programmers.

Those trying out Fedora can download what's called a LiveCD, which enables a computer to boot the operating system from a CD rather than from a disruptive installation on the hard drive. The LiveCD was introduced with Fedora 7, but Ubuntu got there first.

"Back when Fedora 6 came out a year ago, we didn't have a solid LiveCD at all. Ubuntu was killing us because they had it working," Spevack said. So Red Hat jumped on it, and Spevack thinks they even leapfrogged Ubuntu by making a variation that boots off a USB flash memory drive, he said.

"We recognized an area where we were lacking and fixed it in a way that now has set us up technically as being more advanced," he said.

Among other new features in Fedora 8:

• New software to do a better job detecting printers when they're plugged in, installing the appropriate driver automatically, and informing users as the process proceeds. "Plugging in a printer is one of those things that should just work. The new printer stuff we've got in Fedora 8 makes that a lot easier," Spevack said.

• A screen background that changes colors subtly as the day progresses, offering darker images at midnight, perking up as dawn approaches, and becoming bright blue mid-day.

• The PulseAudio application improves some audio abilities, for example letting users set different volumes for different programs or making sure that one user's music is hushed when the system is fast-switched to another user.

• The GNOME Online Desktop, which lets groups of users share information such as blog posting alerts or now-playing music information.

• The tickless kernel, a low-level feature designed to reduce power consumption and increase efficiency by letting the computer actually idle when it's not busy, is now available for 64-bit systems as well as the 32-bit systems that were supported when the feature arrived with Fedora 7.

• Another run at a longstanding problem with Linux, better support for laptop features such as suspend/resume, special keys, and monitor backlights.

Update: I added a lot more detail about Red Hat's ambitions and other moves.

Red Hat on Wednesday announced a significant departure from its current business plan, saying its flagship Linux product will be available on Amazon.com's Elastic Computing Cloud online service.

Previously, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company only sold its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product in the form of a support contract costing between $349 and $2,499 per year. But in a beta program beginning in the fourth quarter, the software will be available on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure, Red Hat said.

The move also signals a new phase in EC2. By using RHEL, a supported product for which numerous applications are certified, the online service looks more like a variation of an existing, established software product and less like a radical departure from how computing is typically performed today.

Currently, EC2, still in beta, is effectively a blank slate on which customers install and manage their own software.

The Amazon partnership was among a host of Red Hat announcements. In addition, the company upgraded its RHEL to version 5.1, including new virtualization abilities with Xen 3.1, announced an upcoming RHEL version geared for use embedded as a foundation for software companies' products, and declared an ambitious goal to conquer half the server market.

"We will more than double our market share to power more than 50 percent of the world's servers by 2015," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice president for worldwide engineering. Part of that ambition will be supported by the promise that software partners won't have to recertify their software for the various RHEL versions--those running on regular servers, on EC2, or on the virtualization foundations from Red Hat, VMware, and Microsoft, Cormier added.

Pricing for the Red Hat EC2 option is variable--a classic example of the "pay as you go" philosophy that some prefer, because it ties expenses to actual use, though it can be less predictable. The service will cost $19 per month plus 21, 53, or 94 cents per hour, depending on computing and storage capacity, plus 11 cents per gigabyte transferred in and 19 cents per gigabyte transferred out.

Each computer being rented is actually a virtual machine, a slice of a physical server that's running several using virtualization software. The "small" RHEL instance offers 1.7GB of memory, 160GB of storage, and Amazon's virtual equivalent of one 32-bit processor core; "medium" bumps that to 7.5GB of memory, 850GB of storage, and two 64-bit cores; and "large" provides 15GB of memory, 1690GB of storage, and 4 64-bit cores.

Customers also can get more storage through use of Amazon's S3 storage service, which costs extra. "While the use of S3 is not mandatory for maintaining a working Red Hat Enterprise Linux cloud server, Red Hat recommends all customers manage their servers and maintain configurations within Amazon's S3 storage infrastructure," Red Hat said in a statement.

New Red Hat horizons
EC2 is just one new horizon Red Hat hopes to call its own turf. Another is the core business of VMware, the market leader for virtualization. The reason: the new version of RHEL comes with Xen 3.1, a significantly more mature virtualization foundation than the version that debuted with RHEL 5.0 earlier this year.

The new version, for example, enables "live migration," which lets software running in a virtual machine be moved, while running, from one physical computer to another. And with 3.1, Red Hat also is offering support for running Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and, when it ships, Server 2008.

"Customers can save $20,000 to $30,000 in licensing fees" compared with VMware, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's enterprise Linux business. And now, many higher-end features available with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure product are free with RHEL: "High availability, clustering, failover, live migration, storage virtualization all are integrated into the core infrastructure," he said.

VMware has a major lead in the marketplace, not to mention more revenue and faster growth than Red Hat. The EMC subsidiary offers not just the basic virtualization but also many higher-level services: its own version of live migration, called VMotion; high availability to move or restart ailing virtual machines; and resource monitoring to ensure virtual machines don't max out their hardware or let idle servers be shut down.

Red Hat, in comparison, is just getting started with virtualization, though Crenshaw said the company is pleased with the accelerating pace of adoption. Customers are using Xen on 18,000 servers, he boasted. One is DreamWorks Animation, which endorsed the technology Wednesday.

Red Hat is cheaper, though, and customers don't have to worry about using two different management interfaces for controlling their servers, the company argued.

Virtual appliances
Virtualization has enabled a new form of software sales: virtual "appliances" that bundle software with an underlying operating system for quick installation on a virtual machine. VMware has been an aggressive evangelist of the approach, and now Red Hat is becoming more directly involved.

The company will offer a version of RHEL called the Red Hat Appliance Operating System in the first half of 2008 that software companies can use to build appliances, along with a software development kit to help build them, said Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens.

The software companies themselves, which act in effect as RHEL resellers, will support the software for customers, but Red Hat will backstop the software companies with level-three support, Cormier said. The software companies will pay Red Hat, probably through a subscription model, that will include access to the Red Hat Network so customer software can be updated, Red Hat said.