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From: www.itworld.com
Bob Young on community, criticism, and profit
March 20, 2001 —
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."
Since Red Hat is not currently profitable, I asked Young when he expected to get into the black. He encouraged me to direct that question to Kevin Thompson, recently named Red Hat's new CFO, or Martin Zulik, the current CFO. So I asked Young, "If Red Hat is not turning a profit, how can you continue to fund the GNOME project and numerous kernel hackers? Red Hat is well known for supporting free software projects like that, which must mean paying salaries to people who aren't doing work for the company, at least not directly." Young replied:
Well, they absolutely do direct work for us. This was really reinforced to us, that within Red Hat we have done a poor job of communicating this commitment to open source. People genuinely don't understand why we are so into doing it. Because they think, these guys are capitalists, they've got to make a return to their shareholders, they can't be that committed to open source. And we go, well, keep in mind, guys, here is how the story works, in 1996 we won InfoWorld's product of the year award, and that year we tied with Microsoft NT.
Those who were most shocked by that award were those of us at Red Hat, because there were only 23 of us, down in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, and the best Microsoft could do with a 3-year head start, a $1-billion budget, and 1,000 of the world's smartest operating system engineers, was to tie us for this award.
You know, if there was ever a moment in time where it became just clear as day to us how this model worked, and where the power of it came from, it was that moment. We understood then that our whole business hinged on our ability to harness this worldwide team of engineers, and so if all we have to do to harness this -- the best work of that worldwide team of engineers -- is to publish every line of code that we write for the purpose of building the products that we build, that's a trivial price to pay compared to the billion dollars that Microsoft has to pay to build an equivalent product.
Remembering the pain of flames I got recently for my column on the Debian install process, I asked Young how he deals with the flames Red Hat has been getting lately, and whether that's just the price you pay for being the largest distribution. He said:
No -- [it's] the price you pay for living in a different world than this industry has grown up around. In other words, vendors can't control communication. The best they can hope to do is manage communications.
There's been a lot of very bright guys commenting on this change in the technology culture that has occurred because of the Internet. It's a little bit like speakers corner in Hyde Park. If you are going to work in a world where every one of your users has the right to stand on a soapbox and say whatever he wants to about your product, you had better have a reasonably tough skin, and a very analytical mind, and a very disciplined approach. You have to know what you are about, because there are going to be people who genuinely love what you're doing and by definition there are going to be people who think you are Satan himself.
And there is no way around that. A lot of people who are attracted to the Linux world are attracted because Microsoft is so pervasive. They want to cheer for the underdog. Within the Linux world, if there is one company which is significantly more successful than the others, well, what do you know, they have a bias against that particular company.
We saw that phenomenon coming from a mile away and it doesn't bother us, because we don't see the community as something to approve or disapprove of us. Because when you think about it, what is a community? It is a collection of individuals. And in the open source space the only thing that these individuals have in common is that we all prefer open source software over proprietary software.
Other than that, we have nothing in common, guys like me and Eric Raymond. Eric is way to the right of Charlton Heston on his views of gun ownership, and I'm actually way to the left of Al Gore on the issue of gun control, even though I happen to be a duck hunter and I enjoy shooting guns. I happen not to believe in the idea that Uzis should be available to high school students.
Next I asked Young about the Red Hat Center, a private foundation set up by Red Hat to support "transparent technology" -- technology "where the public is permitted to see, understand, and possibly improve on what's being developed." (Note that Sun SITEs -- Software Information and Technology Exchanges -- were FTP sites sponsored by Sun to provide easy access to free software. One such site was located at the University of North Carolina.) Young replied:
We've done things like, remember the old Sun SITE, MetaLab, at UNC? Well, that was suffering serious neglect at UNC because no one . . . understood the value. Meanwhile, I would go to Singapore, at a government level [and hear], "Wow! The University of North Carolina is doing fascinating things."
I would talk to the management at UNC when I would visit them just down the street in Chapel Hill, and they would go, "What's Sun SITE? What's MetaLab?"
We've contributed a big chunk of money [to UNC], four million bucks over the next 5 years. Plus, by doing that, we've raised the profile of [MetaLab] dramatically within the UNC system.
We now have the Chancellor going around bragging about MetaLab, which is now being rebranded as "ibiblio.org" (see Resources), or the public library of the Internet. The idea being we're trying to take the content of this public domain of knowledge out of the abstract and make it tangible. Here's where you go to see all the categories of knowledge that we benefit from as individuals because it is in the public domain. And why, if we extend copyrights to perpetuity, you will take things out of the public domain and they will never go back, and that is a bad thing for our society.
At that point we had to cut the interview short. We had started a half-hour late and had gone well past our allotted time. Another interviewer was waiting for his 15 minutes with Young. Our conversation left me with the impression I had been speaking with a "big picture" kind of guy, not a geek. I guess it takes all kinds to build the world's most popular Linux distribution.
- The Red Hat Center:
http://www.rhcenter.org - ibiblio:
http://www.ibiblio.org
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