“Q: Were you surprised by Sun Microsystems’s acquisition of
Cobalt?
A: That was a small business server hardware play they were
focused on. The fact that Cobalt ran on Linux, primarily Red Hat
Linux, is almost incidental to Sun’s reasoning.”
“Q: Some industry observers note that Sun hasn’t been that
friendly with the Linux community. What do you think?
A: Their enemy’s enemies are their friends and their enemy is
Microsoft, so in that sense, we’ve been keeping people in the Unix
world. We’re educating people as to how to do things in Linux. In
that sense, we’re both on the same side. But Sun is nervous that we
might commodify the Unix space.”
“Q: What is the next frontier for Red Hat, and do you intend
to conquer the desktop?
A: It is certainly one of the key areas. We intend to be
successful with the desktop even if we are not successful with the
desktop PC, because there is a big failing with the desktop PC
— if you deploy a bunch of Windows boxes every user becomes his
own system administrator. Our opportunity is with Internet
appliances.”