Red Hat's new chief: A pragmatic believer?

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Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 20 Jun 2008 17:56 BST

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...so many of the dollars for licence fees flow to the US means there is always a sensitivity outside of the US, as all those dollars flow to Redmond or Washington more broadly. A lot of the large European companies are the ones that say: "I would love to have 30 percent of my desktops running Linux", much more so than big US companies.

There is also a clear distinction between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Western Europe obviously has very large, very sophisticated customers, but I think Eastern Europe has huge opportunities because of its extraordinarily well-educated workforce.

Do you think US companies are particularly good at empowering their international business units to act autonomously and take advantage of local conditions? Do you think Red Hat has been good at that in the past? Is it something you can improve?
I think we can certainly improve and we are working hard on that. We started as a small company and had a way of doing things, but I think being more sensitive of ways of doing things around the world is critical. I think we do a better job than most companies, because of who we are and being accepting of different communities, but I think we still have a way to go. Even basic things like channel structures are completely different in Europe, Asia and the US.

Does the patent settlement you announced recently [with FireStar Software] that is consistent with the GPL mean that you are in a better position to be able to settle your patent dispute with Microsoft?
The problem is that we don't know what the Microsoft [patent threat] is. They have said in the past that 235 patents [are infringed by Linux] and we have yet to see what any of them are. Conceptually, it should be possible but, again, we don't know what we are talking about there.

When was the last time you spoke to Microsoft regarding patents?
I am sure, as a company, we have an ongoing dialogue on a lot of things. I have had dialogue at a senior level, but it has been more on how we can work better on interoperability for customers; I haven't had any direct conversations around the patent issue.

On the issue of the desktop — or specifically the mobile client — we have heard rumours that you might be joining the LiMo Foundation. Can you confirm that?
We look at it. We look at it a lot. The problem is: how do you create a business model around it? I have no idea if we are joining that or not but I am sure that, if you chat to some of our guys through the course of the day, they will confirm or deny [it].

We don't sell software; we sell service and support and, as devices are further and further away from something that is mission critical… I want to come back to desktop and why it doesn't make sense for us to do a consumer desktop. I fundamentally believe there are companies that sell hundreds of dollars to millions of people and there are companies that sell millions of dollars to hundreds of people, and there are very few companies that have done both successfully. So, we sell millions of dollars to hundreds of customers — not literally; we have more than hundreds — we are an enterprise company.

Also, I don't see what the market is for a paid, supported Linux desktop. We have a great consumer desktop — it's called Fedora. I love it; I use it at home. I see a lot more opportunity for us in virtualisation and other enterprise components.

However, things have got blurry and we are absolutely focused on the desktop and we are doubling down our investment in the desktop in the enterprise. I think, in the past, we have been blurry and, when people think of desktop, they think of consumer. I think we need to do more on the desktop but, to be clear, it is a desktop for our enterprise customers. I think our enterprise customers want support for the desktop, and that is right in our wheel-house and a core business for us.

Last year, you announced the Online Desktop and Global Desktop products. What happened to those, as we haven't heard much since?
[Whitehurst was not around when these products were announced, so a Red Hat spokesperson intervenes at this point and claims that both strategies are still being supported and that products "take time to appear".]

What I am very clear on is that, being an enterprise company, we have to have a rock-solid enterprise desktop and so I know we are investing heavily there.

So to circle back, what is the position on developing a mobile client?
I would say we are still developing our plans there but, in general, we, as leaders in open source, need to do a lot of things to promote Linux and open source. I don't necessarily see a direct business model there but that doesn't mean that we won't participate and put time and energy against it. But I don't see that as a mainstream part of our business.

I will be frank; we haven't quite figured out how we will be involved, but I look at that more as us being good stewards of open source and Linux, rather than a business model.

Tom Sanders from Webwereld also sat in on this interview and contributed questions to this interview.

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