[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“Earlier this year Red Hat split its range into two
segments–effectively, business and everything else. It did this in
the wrong order, as The Register remarked at the time, but
subsequently the company has padded out its Enterprise range to
consist of Advanced Server, Enterprise Server and Workstation, so
here at least it has a complete set.“But what’s going on with ‘everything else,’ the product line
Red Hat terms ‘consumer’? After speaking to Red Hat marketing VP
Mark de Visser last week The Register left with the strong
impression that the answer in the short term was not a lot, or more
of the same, while the real upheaval will take place in the longer
term, and probably doesn’t yet have anything you’d call a serious
blueprint. Our parting impression, incidentally, should not
necessarily be viewed as criticism; Red Hat, in common with the
other major distributions, is still trying to figure out how you
make money starting from free, and the bottom line is that the
enterprise line shows prospects of making money while the consumer
one as currently constituted does not.“When talking to us de Visser stressed that he wasn’t there to
make product announcements, but he was prepared to talk about the
company’s views and aspirations in sufficient depth for us to make
inferences. So note that what follows is largely Register
inferences, not a Red Hat roadmap…”