Quote about RedHat's focus

Posted Mar 1, 2006 18:51 UTC (Wed) by scripter (subscriber, #2654)
Parent article: The "First Ever Think Tank Report on the Future of Commercial Open Source"

"At this point, the panelists were asked what advice they could offer to 'real' open source companies (most of this conversation centered around Red Hat)?"

"Tim O'Reilly advised Red Hat that they must know what business they are in and that their mentor should be Dell as integration is the heart of their business. Rod Smith agreed that integration/certification is Red Hat's primary value. They've not embraced 'letting go'. It has less to do with open source and more to do with focusing on your customers and building value you can actually deliver. If you are too religious about anything, you're not serving your customers or your business. Finally, Tim O'Reilly cautioned Red Hat to 'watch their data'. Often, the value lies in the data associated with the software and not the software itself. If you don't protect that data, someone drafting behind you could build a business designed to take the profits that should have been yours."

Quote about RedHat's focus

Posted Mar 2, 2006 0:14 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

So essentially Tim O'Reilly advised Red Hat to pull out of the community and concentrate completely on integrating and distributing existing technologies as cheaply as possible on a massive scale (Dell, after all, has a very small R&D budget). If I was a Red Hat shareholder I might like that plan, but as a free software person it worries me a bit.

Quote about RedHat's focus

Posted Mar 2, 2006 3:00 UTC (Thu) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link]

The trouble is that there is a critical difference between DELL and RedHat:

Both are essentially value-add integrators of other's innovations/R&D/Development

BUT:

Dell's "other" is Intel,AMD,via,Nvidia,Samsung,Micron,Hitachi,Maxtor, etc...

RedHat's "others" is jRandom opensource developer. (Not flame bait, I am not saying that is a bad thing or that jRandom developer is not every bit as capable if not more than those companies....)

Dell's suppliers are beholden to $'s and respond very well to the specific needs of a large customer like Dell. Dell gets what it needs to maximize profits for Dell.

RedHat's suppliers are beholden to a much more ephemeral "market pressure" of "what is popular amonst open source developers". If RedHat _needs_ something specific, it has a vested interest in "fostering" the community effort (or just doing it themsleves) to ensure that something (that would otherwise prove unintersting to those of us without "enterprise" hardware to run) gets done.

So, RedHat can never be as "hands off" as Dell and still get what it needs. RedHat's profit margin comes from a relatively (relative to random linux users), small market of enterprise users who have specific needs that often don't match up with what the broader user-base of linux needs.

This points out the issue I keep running into with the binary (as in black/white) open vs proprietary software argument which is that the answer is somewhere in between.

There are those applications which apply to the broader user-base where opensource works very well and then there are those applications which are only of interest to a small community where time and expertise are not sufficiently distributed to support "the bazzare". In fact there are applications like the "Operating System" which have become too large for one company to effectively steward... it NEEDS a community.

Even those "niche" applications eventually become sufficiently well understood at some point that it does not take a large community to support it, but that is long after the "innovation" phase of that solution has passed... So, the proprietary app transitions from innovation to commodity and the "best" support model changes with it...

All that said, I understand that humans are far better at changing through revolution than evolution, so RMS cannot afford to be pragmatic...