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But now some of the disruptive energy seems to have dropped away, as attention turns increasingly to the collaborative potential of the Web. Google and the buzzword du jour, Web 2.0, are capturing the attention once enjoyed by the struggle between Linux, Windows and Unix. As the operating system layer becomes commoditized, focus appears to be shifting to the Web as the real disruptive platform.
Against this backdrop, some of the darlings of the open-source community may struggle to stay relevant and hang onto the kudos they once enjoyed. Red Hat is the leading provider of enterprise-ready Linux, and continues to enjoy financial success as a result, but how does the company evolve and stay relevant in a world where the operating system is not the talking point it once was?
ZDNet UK sat down with Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik at the company's user summit in Nashville for a brief discussion on how he intends to keep his company on the cutting edge and battle the biggest threats to its future success.
Some of the momentum around Linux seems to be petering out; how do you maintain interest in your company, and what else do open source and Linux have to offer?
I think that it takes a strong sense of identity to know that what you are and what you do is vital. We are an infrastructure supplier that creates a high-level operating system. We have some incredibly bright, highly informed people who love technology. To make any kind of shift of direction based on the latest trend would be a mistake--the market would spit me out.
But isn't the entertainment technology project you announced today--Mugshot--based around the kind of online collaboration technology at the heart of Web 2.0?
Some commentators have claimed that Microsoft is beginning to soften its stance on open source and Linux, and is becoming less confrontational--is that something you have witnessed?
They continue to be as aggressive as hell, as far as I am concerned. They have still got an awful lot of firepower.
If your acquisition of application server company JBoss had been completed in time for this summit, would you have more to talk about beyond the operating system layer?
The acquisition has not been delayed--I think that we set expectations for it to complete in the early part of June. Until then I can't really say very much beyond broad generalizations of how it will affect our business.
What do you see as the biggest challenges facing Red Hat at the moment?
Well, integrating JBoss into our business is a pretty important one. But continuing development around Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and pushing ahead with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (due by the end of this year) are also challenges.
Andrew Donoghue of ZDNet UK reported from Nashville, Tenn.
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what I've read and observed over the past few years, it appears
to be less so every day. It looks like the day of the fat client on
everyone's desk has peaked.
Whether we get our apps from the Internet (Google, Live, etc) or
a corporate server, it appears it won't be very many years until
end users don't know or care what runs their workstation/
device/whatever.
That trend should help companies whose server OS's are gaining
marketshare (Redhat, Novell-SuSE, etc) and hurt those who
depend on fat clients (Microsoft).
The way companies like Microsoft are trying diversify by moving
into other areas like gaming, mobile phones, and web services,
it looks like they agree.
I'm an Integration Architect, building SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) services for a very large financial services company.
M$ has previously talked about "online software" & that's a bit misleading. But not far off the mark. If there is greater take-up of UDDI & dynamic service discovery, there's going to be services embedded all over, whether it's a dictionary service embedded in Word, or selt-service acount maintenance for banking.
Then consider the insulation provided by Java apps. running in the JVM, using JNDI, RMI/RCP, CORBA IIOP, etc.
It does make the whole workstation data security issue look so 5 minutes ago. I wanna be a Trusted Authority, issuing certificates. There's a fortune to be made there. Just please lets make sure the guvment don't get into this business - they would NOT be Trusted.
Ultimately, your workstation OS is going to be running more & more applications, that are just GUI's & orchestration services.
Q. Taken a step further, could the OS itself benefit from using remote services ?
From what I read Windows is almost 100% dominant in the United States only. Many other countries prefer open source or non Windows alternatives. I am very much in the minority here in the US, as I prefer anything that is not Microsoft. A lot of the forums I read from for Linux and BSD and other platforms like ZETA, enjoy substantially more success in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia compared to here in the states.
Joshua
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=10780
Linux is doing great in the server market as far as I know. If you do have contradictory statistics you might want to send it in.
Excuse me? You're not ready to give up all the other things you would like to do with a computer? I guess that means your focus won't be shifting from the operating system to the web as the article claims it will.