In an interview with Dan Farber and Stephen Shankland, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik gave his perspective on Red Hat's software strategy in light of the UnitedLinux effort.

Farber: You've got about a 50 percent market share of the Linux server space.

Szulik: Yes.

Farber: That's doing pretty well. And it seems to me that your other competition would come from the other Linux players who've just formed a UnitedLinux organization. Do you have any plans to join up with them so that there's one distribution of Linux?

Szulik: Well, we would like to believe that the work we that have continued to do as a Linux and open source provider focused on the GPL--that has been really the core of the company since its founding--really takes advantages of all of the benefits that accrue towards an open-source software development model. And we've worked very hard on this over the last seven years as a company and have built the kind of ISV and IHV relationships around this, because the core premise of our business is that the collaborative approach of open-source software development fundamentally produces a more reliable and more secure product at the lowest possible price.

We've searched pretty hard to try to find out what UnitedLinux is all about, really have not found out a whole lot of detail. And our strategy as a pure open-source play is intact, so that will continue to be our mission.

Shankland: A lot of analysts and other folks perceive UnitedLinux to be directed chiefly at Red Hat. Would you agree with that assessment?

Szulik: I don't know what they're directed at. I think that their approach to the opportunity is intriguing, and certainly from my own personal perspective the more people we have making contributions to the open-source community, all the better. I find it hard to believe why companies at this stage of the market development would want to target a company that's on track to do $100 million dollars as compared to companies that are doing $30 or $50 billion dollars. That logic escapes me a little bit.

Farber: You don't really think of yourself as a company just doing a $100 million dollars or $80 million dollars, don't you have really ambitious plans? Wouldn't you like to be the next Microsoft except maybe a little more of a benevolent dictatorship?

Szulik: No, I would not want to be like the next Microsoft. I think we would like to be able to execute like them, I think we would like to be able to produce the quality of products of other great technical companies. And I think the market that we're seeing--as I have stated earlier--is consistently expanding, especially our focus on the enterprise market.

But my perspective on this whole UnitedLinux activity is that it takes an awful lot of capital to build a successful global franchise to support ISVs like Oracle and Veritas and TIBCO and the main enterprise ISVs. Certainly the Dell, the Compaq and HP announcement that we just made yesterday--it requires an awful lot of time and attention and capital. And so therefore it's hard for me to see how these four Linux vendors--the hybrid approach that they seem to be consolidating into--is going to be able to succeed with the demanding requirements of the customer and the support that's required to compete on a global basis.

To view a video clip of this interview, click here.

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