Red Hat CEO talks virtualisation, Linux and the cloud

• Tags:
• Virtualisation,
• Kernel,
• Mission,
• Cnet News

Alex Serpo ZDNet Australia

Published: 20 Oct 2008 15:17 BST

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…it is going to get a lot more companies who may not have spent a lot of time looking at open source before, to looking at it and consuming a lot more open source. I think there is no question.

If you look at the basic operating costs of IT infrastructure, they have just gone up and up, basically because there has been this creep of additional costs. This is the other thing that I emphasise hard with customers — I think it resonates, because I think it is true — that we have developed a business model that is fundamentally more customer-friendly.

What I mean by that is, there is no vendor lock-in. By far our biggest competitor is not Microsoft, it's people who stop paying us but continue to use our software. If you think about that, our mission is to continue to get people paying the subscription, that means you need 'x' months' customer service, and you need to add functionality that they really, really want. Because if not, why pay us?

That is fundamentally different to a proprietary software company. The average propriety software company has to, every few years, drive an upgrade cycle, because that's how they get their revenue. So they'll add new functionality. It doesn't matter if the customer wants that functionality or not, but they have to drive an upgrade cycle. I hear from CIOs complaining all the time. Not about the licensing costs, but just going in to have to replace a piece of software that is running just fine, with a new one, because they are forced to do it.

But that's part of the gig with the average software licence model. The other one is, if you're a proprietary software company, the most powerful thing you have working to your advantage is lock-in. So you work really hard to make sure your products lock people in.

Our model is the exact opposite of that. Because we can't lock you in, we make sure we build choice for you. Because we don't have to worry about lock-in, we can really fight for standards and work to standardise and commoditise.

Not only is open source just cheaper, subscription costs versus licence costs, it helps to promote choice at other layers. The classic example is Unix to Linux: you can look at the cost of the operating systems, but the big value is being able to go from proprietary Risc hardware to commodity x86 hardware.

We are kind of doing that at multiple layers, and for subscribers who buy into the subscription, and understand the value of partnering with Red Hat, there are significant savings in areas in which Red Hat doesn't even compete, because we generate choice at those others layers.

Red Hat lives on servers, while Canonical is trying push Linux on the desktop with some success. Do you think Linux will ever be mainstream on the desktop?
Over time, I think it will be. I get asked a lot about that. At Red Hat we have some major, major instances of companies using an enterprise desktop, and we're certainly in the enterprise desktop space. I think the big question is — and I don't have the answer to this — is: 'What happens in the consumer space?'.

The reason I say that is, I don't understand why consumers should pay for Linux, Linux is free. The average consumer at home, people have gotten use used to the blue screen of death with Windows, right? If you're not running something that's mission critical, why should you pay for it, go download Fedora or download Ubuntu.

The big question is not whether it will be successful over time — certainly Linux desktops will take more share. The question is: 'Is that a commercial model for anyone?'

Credit: Q&A: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst from ZDNet Australia

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