March 20, 2001, 3:06 PM —
In part two of this interview, Bob Young, chairman of Red Hat Software, opens up a little about the Red Hat Network, profitability, the true power of the Linux community, living with criticism from within the Linux community, and the Red Hat Center.
In part one, Young described how Slackware had earned a 90 percent market share in Linux's early days by providing downloadable software, thus offering users the latest versions instead of CDs that contained six-month-old code. Red Hat learned from that example; Marc Ewing worked on a package manager that, with financial assistance from Caldera, finally became RPM (Red Hat Package Manager), which is now the most widely used Linux package manager.
I began the second half of the interview by asking if Red Hat intended the recently launched Red Hat Network to continue the philosophy of immediate availability.
Young replied, "The Red Hat Network is very much a continuation of the philosophy that Marc [Ewing], Rick Faith, and Eric Troan really set in motion for Red Hat back in the summer of '95." Later, he added that "what the Red Hat Network is all about is making sysadmins dramatically more productive than they already are."
