Report on Red Hat World Tour, Boston

Dan Coutu coutu at snowy-owl.com
Tue Mar 30 14:08:00 EST 2004


Yesterday I attended the Red Hat Linux World Tour event in Boston.
It was an interesting event and they spoke a fair amount about
their strategic direction and future plans. As is fairly clear by
now they are focused on the enterprise customer who needs real
support for their Linux servers. Toward that end they've been beefing
up RHN so that it is becoming something of a competitor to Open View
in addition to the original update management capabilities it had.
I'm not really convinced of just how valuable RHN really is, especially
for the small and medium sized businesses. Does anyone have real
experience with using it?

They are putting quite a bit of effort into broadening the capabilities
of the system by providing more middle-ware pieces on top of the base
operating system. For example they are adding a J2EE Application Server
(based on the Jonas app server) that will be bundled with the system.

They've been aggressively establishing business relationships with
other vendors and that seems to be going really well. They recently
established a deal with Windriver (who is the 800 pound gorilla of
the embedded systems software space) where RH Linux would be the
base O/S of choice. They are also having increasing better response
from companies like NVidia for improved graphics drivers. This is all
pretty encouraging news.

One of the most interesting tidbits I learned from the evening is of
a project called White Box Enterprise Linux which provides a set of
binaries built from the RHEL sources that is available without the
Red Hat annual service fees. You can learn more about them from
their website (and can download the CD iso images too!) at:

http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/


-- 
Dan Coutu
Managing Director
Snowy Owl Internet Consulting, LLC
http://www.snowy-owl.com




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