:InfoWorld: Michael Tiemann: Red Hat's CTO examines his role and the future of Linux
InfoWorld: Michael Tiemann: Red Hat's CTO examines his role and the future of Linux Feb 25, 2000, 19 :34 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (3068 reads) (Other stories by Ed Scannell)
"Michael Tiemann's early work with GNU software created world-leading technologies, becoming an inspiration to Linus Torvalds and
an enabling technology for Linux in 1991. He continues to shape the future of open source today as chief technical officer at Red
Hat. Prior to joining Red Hat, Tiemann co-founded and served as acting CTO at Cygnus Solutions, which was acquired by Red Hat in
January. Tiemann sat down with Editor at Large Ed Scannell to talk about his work at Red Hat and the issues facing Linux in
today's marketplace."
"InfoWorld: What do you think is the biggest misperception about Linux in the industry today?"
"Tiemann: Just this week I read a comment from an analyst that made me see red. Many of them are using the wrong yardstick by which
to measure Linux. The comment was about how Linux doesn't have clustering, high availability, volume manager, and file system
support. That sort of comment ignores the Red Hat-Veritas relationship, the Red Hat-Oracle relationship, and our clustering
technology that we developed several years ago and that several others have reimplemented or rebranded in various ways."
"InfoWorld: So it's basically overlooking the collective technical strength of the Linux community?"
"Tiemann: Some analysts are making assumptions about what Linux can't do, and this completely misses the point, which is that with
open-source technologies, anything can be done. I was at the Intel Developer Forum, where the big news there was the IA-64
architecture. As I wandered around looking at all the systems demonstrating this processor, every one I saw was running Red Hat
Linux. Not too many were [running] Windows 2000. When you see the SGI [Silicon Graphics Inc.] running cluster machines and IBM
running parallel servers, you begin to get the idea that any [user] can do this tomorrow."
