summary from the red hat summit

We announced a pile of things at the Red Hat Summit. Lots of confusing articles have been written. Lots of press releases have been sent out filled with warnings about forward looking statements. Maybe you just want the run down on all the things that happened. This is your simple cheat sheet. Here’s the list:

Red Hat announced a long term client strategy. Widely quoted out of context as “The Desktop Paradigm is Dead”, what we really mean is that we’re moving to a model where Red Hat and open source client technologies move to an online world. To a place where consumers are moving en masse, but operating systems have been slow to follow. We believe that most companies who sell operating systems today will be more interested in protecting their cash cows than moving to a model that enables new types of collaboration and communication. The time to move online is now, and the open source model gives us the flexibility we need to get out in front.

Red Hat will lead this effort. We’ve already been leading with our investments in Mugshot, One Laptop per Child and years of investments and leadership in GNOME and Linux. The base OS is ready. It’s time to start competing for real and bringing open source to a place where it can win.

Red Hat announced a new product: Red Hat Global Desktop. The Global Desktop product is a fully featured desktop based on the same code as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop product. However, there are some significant differences in terms of the support and distribution model.

First, our main partner in building this product is Intel. Intel gives us the support we need in terms of open source drivers and the channel to make the product successful. We will be able to certify this product across a wide variety of products that Intel is building. This is thanks to the wonderful work that they have done upstream and made available to the entire open source community.

Second, the distribution model is different. This product will be available only as a pre-load to those vendors through the channel. It’s not something you’ll be able to download on a CD or DVD. This is largely due to the fact that we’ll be working with those vendors to make sure that they can support people on this product instead of us attempting to do that support ourselves. In this way Red Hat will be the back end support provider for all those folks in the channel, letting them add a lot of value along the way, and we can offer them a properly priced product that they can sell to customers who really want something like this.

Third, this product is targeted in its first round at so-called BRIC and/or Developing World countries. And it’s priced for those markets as well. We are keeping the door open to the developed world as well, but the demand seems to be coming from the rest of the world first where the opportunity is for new systems, not attempting to convert existing enterprise customers.

And Fourth, this product has a shorter life cycle to enable fast-paced innovation. Instead of being support for 7 years, like the rest of our RHEL products, this has a 2 year support life cycle. We got a lot of questions from the press along the lines of “if the desktop is dead, then why are you announcing a new desktop product?” The answer is that the Global Desktop product is a first step along the path to an online world. This is the direction that we’re going and we have to start somewhere. As most of the rest of the world comes online, we will be ready to meet them with something engaging and interesting, designed for a connected world.

In summary, this is about growing the Linux client market. This isn’t about trying to replace some small set of Windows desktops in the developed world or trying to line up a relatively small number of units through a US OEM. This is about getting out there where people will grow up on free and open source software and understand that it’s not just free-as-in-cheap, but is also better and empowering to how they lead their lives and run their businesses. It’s just the first step, but it’s an important one.

Red Hat announced a set of Microsoft-compatible fonts that are free to distribute. Called the Liberation Fonts these fonts solve one of the biggest problems we’ve had with building office-compatible software: the fonts never quite matched up. They are available under a very friendly license and should be in Fedora and RHEL shortly.

Red Hat announced Red Hat Exchange. This is a web site and a set of agreements with open source software vendors designed to give customers a great experience with deployment and support. You can download a single software build that includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and everything else you need to deliver a solution based on that partner’s software for your business. If you have a problem, you contact Red Hat support and they will work with the vendor to help you solve your problem. One price, one download, one point of contact and growing the open source business ecosystem at the same time.

Red Hat announced support for Intel’s vPro initiative. Designed to make Windows machines more manageable by placing an operating system underneath Windows to deal with security, deployment and administration, VPro is likely to make a huge difference in the lives of IT people inside of large organizations who have to deal with the day to day headaches of managing workstations and protecting Windows from itself.

Red Hat will build a set of high performance drivers for Windows to take advantage of paravirtualization found in our products. Quietly mentioned in Brian’s keynote, we’ll be building a set of drivers so that Windows won’t suck when it’s running on a supported hypervisor. This will be something new for Red Hat to do, but something that people will really value.

Whew. That’s a long list. Any questions?