“ITD: What’s happening with the Red Hat Share
price?
MS: I wish I knew. I think there are really a
number of factors at work here but predominantly the issue is that
of the Nasdaq correction. We have taken a hit along with a host of
other market players and I really don’t think that we are being
treated any differently to the rest of the market. …”
“ITD: Are we witnessing a Linux market
shake-out?
MS: I think that is most definitely the case.
The shake-out is really inevitable though given that this is such
an early market it is the same sort of thing we saw with Yahoo and
Lycos some time ago. It’s the kind of readjustment you should
expect. Having said that however, early to market players like
ourselves can expect to benefit from this market readjustment. We
are continuing to execute very effectively and are recruiting very
aggressively to form a management team that is very much capable of
taking Red Hat towards becoming the billion dollar company that we
expect. In January we appointed Michael Tiemann to the position of
Chief Technical Officer (previously CTO of Cygnus Solutions) and
more recently we brought Harold Covert (formerly CFO and Executive
VP of Adobe) in for the position of Chief Financial Officer
(CFO).”
“ITD: Will Red Hat ever do non open source
software?
MS: No never. To underline our
commitment to the open source cause I can point to the acquisition
of Cygnus as a prime example. When we took it on board it had a
number of proprietary software products that would undoubtedly have
been a good sell for us but it wasn’t open source so we dropped it.
Those products will never go to market.”