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PlanetIT: Interview: Linux Disrupts The Status Quo; Michael Tiemann, Red Hat CTO

Q: What are disruptive dynamics?

A: The premise of disruptive technology is
that when measured conventionally, it doesn’t measure up in any
real way, but when measured according to new markets or the new
customers that it enables, it rises to the top and exceeds
conventional technology.
I see a disruptive shift away from
proprietary platforms and toward building open platforms. The fact
that Linux doesn’t run Microsoft applications is terrible from a
conventional perspective, but the fact that Linux gives you an open
platform on which to build your infrastructure and is so much
better than the proprietary alternatives is what explains our
growth rate.”

Q: What are some places that you think the
open source community is being innovative right now?

A: TUX, certainly. TUX is an architecture for
network services, for accelerating network services. But it’s
disguised as a Web server. Last year we announced world-record
performance in single, dual, four-way and eight-way processor
configurations for SPECweb99. And we continue to hold the record in
each of those categories. As the hardware has gotten faster, we’ve
posted new numbers. With the TUX server architecture, we’ve been
able to show linear scalability from one to eight processors. In
fact we expect to be able to continue on. As long as people build
the hardware correctly, we see no problem with scaling to 16 or 32
processors as well. When we get closer to that, we can develop an
opinion about 64 processors. An example to put this into context: A
TUX accelerator for Apache allows you to scale a machine from 300
simultaneous connections to 3,000 with no changes to the
hardware.”

Q: It looks to me like Microsoft is getting
nervous about Linux. Do you see Whistler as a sort of showdown with
Linux?

A: I’ve been told that one of the biggest
features of Whistler is the availability of a command-line
interface for Windows. I don’t know if you ever saw the T-shirt
that used to say “Windows 95 equals Macintosh 89,” but I can
imagine a T-shirt that says “Whistler 2002 equals Unix 69.” But no,
I don’t think there’s any sort of showdown happening. We’re
fundamentally trying to change the economics of the computer
industry by putting power into the hands of users, which is
something Microsoft and other members of the proprietary-system
industry are not willing to do. We aren’t going to butt heads with
Microsoft because we’re not really on the same path. Is Microsoft
threatened because we’re not following them down the same road?
Perhaps.”


Complete Story
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