Good karma for Red Hat

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 22 November 2006 06:33

Opinion and Analysis

While unable to provide figures, McLaren claims that Red Hat has been experiencing good growth worldwide - 40 percent is his figure, though the base wasn't mentioned. "This is predominantly in the Unix to Linux migration space though we have been seeing some Windows to Linux migration as well," he says.

Oracle's entry into the list of Linux providers is a new challenge for Red Hat whose stock price took a dive when the database giant made its announcement. Oracle is doing what others like CentOS and Red Flag (in China) have done - strip the trademarks out of Red Hat's Linux offering and sell it. McLaren claims the value proposition which Red Hat brings to the table is better because these vendors are now creating their own code forks. "We add only what comes from the upstream developers and this code is open."

The additional value, he says, comes from the 2000-plus independent software and hardware vendors who certify that their offerings will work with Red Hat.
 
The acquisition of JBoss earlier this year meant Red Hat was now in a position to offer web applications for the enterprise, McLaren said. Red Hat will also be offering the latest virtualisation technology from Xen in its next enterprise Linux beta.

It is noteworthy that again Red Hat has chosen to go with Xen - even though the best known virtualisation software, VMware, went open source some months ago. Once again, this underlines the fact that perceptions are very important in the free and open source software space. It also draws a line between a company which makes open source its primary business and one which sees open source only as a means of bettering its bottom line.