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Making customers successful using open source technologies is the mission of open source software vendors. High quality support is crucial to successful long-term relationships between vendors and their customers. However, support is rarely provided in a vacuum and often involves software outside a vendor’s own catalog. Setting up cooperative support agreements with other vendors is a costly exercise that results in documents that are quickly outdated when contact information or escalation procedures change.
Because Red Hat understands the value of collaborative support, Red Hat’s global support organization created the Cooperative Resolution Center (CRC) using a communication infrastructure managed by a third party non-profit group called TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network). The CRC aims to improve support experiences for customers using software from multiple vendors by streamlining cooperative support efforts.
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August is heating up for Red Hat with another busy schedule of events. Continuing our efforts in the government sector, Red Hat will be participating in two Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Cyber Security Awareness Days this month. The one-day events will provide an opportunity for Red Hat to demonstrate the latest information assurance and security products and services that help to support the FAA’s mission to promote aviation safety and mobility by building, maintaining and operating the nation’s air traffic control system.
Tune in for our virtualization webinar on August 20 to hear Andy Cathrow, Product Manager, give an overview of Red Hat’s open source virtualization offerings. The webinar will offer an update on the virtualization features included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and tell you how to leverage the opportunity to save between $5-10k per server when compared with proprietary offerings.
Matthew Szulik, Chairman of Red Hat, will be the guest speaker at this month’s Triangle Business Leaders Breakfast. Join him at the Capital City Club in downtown Raleigh on Tuesday, August 19.
Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has been working with its partners to extend the enterprise open source community by bringing more of our partners’ software into Fedora and EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). Zimbra has long seen the value of making its software easily accessible by the large community of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux users, so it recently leveraged RHX to help get useful community feedback on a license issue.
Earlier this month, Zimbra announced on its forums that in collaboration with Red Hat and the Fedora community, it made a change to the Yahoo! Public License (YPL) Version 1.0 in order to meet Fedora licensing requirements. Red Hat Exchange was an integral part in helping Zimbra advance this initiative.
Here’s the background: To be included in Fedora, software must either have a license certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) (http://www.opensource.org/licenses), or terms that meet the open source definition as outlined by the OSI (http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd). Zimbra is licensed under the YPL which has not yet been submitted for OSI approval. » Read more
Today we released the seventh update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, marking the point where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 enters the autumn of its life cycle. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is now marching toward the Production 2 life cycle phase — formerly known as the “Transition” or “Deployment” phase. From this point forward, the amount of change introduced for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 minor releases is decreasing constantly as Red Hat focuses its efforts on addressing continued stabilization of the release.
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A recent blog accompanying the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 update discussed the value of the life cycle of Enterprise Linux. And in June, during a presentation at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, we mentioned our plans to improve the current life cycle in an effort to provide the coverage that our customers and partners have been requesting.
So, as of today, the first phase of the life-cycle for every Red Hat Enterprise Linux major release is being extended from three years to four. During the first phase of the life cycle we provide support for new hardware that is released by our partners, important new software functionality, bug fixes and security patches.
This extension of the first life cycle phase provides a simple but important benefit for customers: it will be possible to purchase new hardware and find that it is supported on your deployed version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for an additional year. Similarly, it will often be possible to take advantage of new software features that would previously have required an upgrade to access.
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If you didn’t get to attend FUDCon last month, the community made several exciting announcements including the availability of Fedora Talk, the new Fedora telephony system. Based on the free VoIP project Asterisk, Fedora Talk allows Fedora contributors to use any standard VoIP hardware or software to sign into the Fedora system and make and receive calls to other Fedora contributors.
Fedora contributors can set up ad hoc conferences, further deepening social connections and creating a more efficient method for communication when working on certain projects. In the future, we hope to add web conference capabilites for anyone with VoIP access. There are other possibilities to explore with Fedora Talk as well. What if, in the future, a Fedora volunteer could claim an hour of time to run a VoIP phone and answer user or contributor questions?
Fedora Talk is further enabling the community and providing another vehicle to bring our worldwide contributor base closer together. A special thanks to Digium, the company behind Asterisk, which has provided SIP handsets to many members of the Fedora infrastructure team, engineers and Fedora team leaders operating in remote areas across the globe. We also want to thank our hosting and bandwidth provider, Server Beach, and also Arrival Telecom for their donation of several dial-in numbers in the US and the UK. » Read more
Since the settlement of the Firestar lawsuit last month, we’ve been asked to explain why Red Hat settled the case, rather than fighting to invalidate the patent at issue in the lawsuit. The news some days back that the Patent Office had issued an initial, non-final action rejecting the claims in a re-examination of the same patent has inspired similar questions. Here are our thoughts.
The patent asserted in the Firestar lawsuit was U.S. Patent No. 6,101,502. In a perfect world, this patent and others like it would not even be awarded. In an almost-perfect world, even if such patents were awarded, there would be a fair opportunity to challenge their validity. Unfortunately, that is not the world we currently live in with respect to U.S. patent law.
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Red Hat’s government team today announced its new Government Advisory Board, a panel of public sector technology industry experts who will provide strategic advice to help the government team continue its rapid growth trend. The advisory board, which will meet on a quarterly basis, is comprised of a number of industry luminaries including S. Bradford Antle, Dr. Edward H. Bersoff, Dr. Renato “Renny” A. DiPentima, Jerry C. Harrison, Carleton S. Jones and Dendy Young.
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Last month, we announced that Red Hat had settled a patent infringement case with an agreement that was significant in fashioning a new model for protection for the open source community. In the agreement, we obtained coverage not only for Red Hat, but also for upstream and downstream members of the community involved in developing, using, modifying, and distributing code included in Red Hat’s products and in the community projects that Red Hat sponsors, including Fedora. We demonstrated that it is possible to satisfy the letter and spirit of GPL licensing in resolving patent litigation.
The free and open source software community is a spirited, independent-minded group of people who think for themselves. It is not surprising, therefore, that there have been numerous questions about the agreement and requests to make it publicly available. In the spirit of freedom and openness, we are happy to make the agreement public today here. We hope it will be a useful tool both in addressing existing legal threats and also in suggesting methods for addressing threats as yet unknown.
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On June 25, we reported the results for Red Hat’s first quarter of Fiscal Year 2009, which began at the start of March 2008. Initial street reaction to our announcement ranged from “Solid Results” to “In-Line.” There were two downgrades based on relative valuation, but these analysts remain postive on RHT and want to see further earnings expansion to increase their price targets and ratings. A number of investors and analysts said that they would have liked to see higher billings growth in the quarter, but they noted that the additional color on the solid bookings that was discussed on the call was very helpful. Overall, Red Hat’s earnings were solid, especially considering the current challenges of the economy.
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