Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Thursday 4 December 2008, 9:24 AM
So... is the open source model broken or not?
A BusinessWeek article says the open source model is broken. But Red Hat's CEO tells us it isn't.
The original article actually says "the open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors", and it's by Stuart Cohen, CEO of Collaborative Software Initiative, and a supporter of the Microsoft/Novell deal.
As Matthew Aslett points out at 451 CAOS Theory, Cohen, does not say open source won't work, merely that it's not going to give good returns to investors, as long as it relies on basic support revenues for the Linux kernel.
The day that article came out, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehouse told us more or less the same thing: "If all we did was give support for free software we would be out of business," he told a group of journalists in London on Monday. "We might as well call ourselves Joe's Linux Support."
Instead (and this abbreviates what Whitehouse told us), Red Hat aims to ride a wave of change, as IT users move to cloud models, and clouds all adopt Linux. Red Hat provides the broad horizontal functions and middleware that clouds require, but stops short of providing actual cloud services (unlike Microsoft, with Azure).
All this - like the FLOSS 2020 report which also came out this week - can seem somewhat fuzzy, and un-technical. But that goes with the territory.
Open source is ready to take over the mainstream, but that means reaching out into areas where users won't care what operating system their application is running on, and in many cases (like clouds) they actually won't even know.
Whitehouse came to Red Hat from outside the IT industry (from Delta Airlines) and makes no apologies for that, endearingly dismissing technical issues as "speeds and feeds".
He sees himself as a transitional figure, helping Red Hat broaden its appeal: "We win on technology, in companies that use IT for competitive advantage, but we don't do so well with mainstream customers."
He's pushing the company to do more strategic thinking and smarten up its sales processes: "Last year, Red Hat had its first strategic plan," he says, something the company had thought it didn't need, in a period of highly profitable growth.
What does it need now? "Well-schooled sales people."
The original article actually says "the open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors", and it's by Stuart Cohen, CEO of Collaborative Software Initiative, and a supporter of the Microsoft/Novell deal.
As Matthew Aslett points out at 451 CAOS Theory, Cohen, does not say open source won't work, merely that it's not going to give good returns to investors, as long as it relies on basic support revenues for the Linux kernel.
The day that article came out, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehouse told us more or less the same thing: "If all we did was give support for free software we would be out of business," he told a group of journalists in London on Monday. "We might as well call ourselves Joe's Linux Support."
Instead (and this abbreviates what Whitehouse told us), Red Hat aims to ride a wave of change, as IT users move to cloud models, and clouds all adopt Linux. Red Hat provides the broad horizontal functions and middleware that clouds require, but stops short of providing actual cloud services (unlike Microsoft, with Azure).
All this - like the FLOSS 2020 report which also came out this week - can seem somewhat fuzzy, and un-technical. But that goes with the territory.
Open source is ready to take over the mainstream, but that means reaching out into areas where users won't care what operating system their application is running on, and in many cases (like clouds) they actually won't even know.
Whitehouse came to Red Hat from outside the IT industry (from Delta Airlines) and makes no apologies for that, endearingly dismissing technical issues as "speeds and feeds".
He sees himself as a transitional figure, helping Red Hat broaden its appeal: "We win on technology, in companies that use IT for competitive advantage, but we don't do so well with mainstream customers."
He's pushing the company to do more strategic thinking and smarten up its sales processes: "Last year, Red Hat had its first strategic plan," he says, something the company had thought it didn't need, in a period of highly profitable growth.
What does it need now? "Well-schooled sales people."
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