Episode: 384
Title: HPR0384: Red Hat Interview
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0384/hpr0384.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:32:03

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For all this…
Thank you.
Hi everyone, this was Clat 2 and I'm here at Southeast Linux Fest sitting actually behind
the Red Hat booth.
I feel really official.
I'm talking to Eric.
Hey, Eric.
Hey, how are you doing today?
Pretty good.
So Red Hat is obviously one of the more, I guess, famous Linux companies and you guys
sponsor Fedora, which I use quite often.
And I think, what, 5.3 just came out?
Yeah, for the enterprise, Linux 5.3 really is not too long ago for both the desktop
and the server.
Okay.
Desktop, meaning that if you have a big organization and you need people to use Linux,
then if you can get this Red Hat license and have it as a site license or whatever,
it works.
Yeah, definitely.
Lots of large firms will make the switch to Linux on the desktop for all of their regular
employees for their sort of office type uses, email, documents and things like that.
Yeah.
Well, you know one of the more interesting ones that I saw, I do a lot of film and video
work as well and I was at NAV, National Associates and Broadcasters and there was a graphics
company, Autodesk.
Yeah.
And there was a program called SMOTE, but I actually did do a lot, but it's for Linux
and it runs on Red Hat.
So it was like a huge film company basically running Red Hat in the background.
You get a lot of that as well.
Yeah, a lot of the big graphics design firms will use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their
render farms.
Yeah.
You know, to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the back end.
Yeah.
It's also very popular in engineering circles.
So, you know, mathematics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering.
A lot of the computer-aided design suite are all certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
So you'll see workstation users, you know, and those firms will, you know, run Red Hat on
their quote unquote desktop for those engineering users.
So what's the difference, I mean, I know Fedora is kind of like the cutting edge.
What's the difference, I guess, between running Fedora and Red Hat?
So really, when you're running Red Hat, you're getting a certified tested hardened product.
So Fedora is sort of the future of Red Hat and what the Red Hat team does is the engineers
will take Fedora at some point in time and sort of take a snapshot of and freeze it and say,
this is where we're going to start.
And they go through a rigorous process of testing QA and patching and all these processes
to make sure that the product that Red Hat is going to provide to its customers
is going to be the most enterprise-ready stable, you know, supportable product to take and provide.
And there's no non-free software in Red Hat.
I mean, like, how is that even possible?
They make a whole operating system without, surely you need something, you know,
from Apple or Microsoft or Adobe.
So there are certainly components that end users, that customers may require,
that may fall under the proprietary category.
And the most common example I talk about is something like an Oracle database.
Obviously, you know, Oracle database is a product used by many, many, many large companies
to run, you know, lots of heavy applications.
Right.
And obviously that's, quote, unquote, non-free.
Yeah.
So all of the underlying components behind that, behind the Red Hat operating system,
are, you know, all open-source free, the source code is available,
you need enough to pay, they get them to use them.
But, you know, customers still will find themselves using third-party, you know,
provide their application as a best-of-breed solution for the things that they have to do.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, I mean, why would a company want to go with Red Hat as a problem?
If they're going to spend money on, on, you know, a computer solution,
why wouldn't they just go with something like Windows, you know, that everyone else will use, you know.
It really depends on what's going on.
I mean, generally speaking, Red Hat in the server, in the data center,
can be a lesser, a lesser expensive solution.
It can be easier to manage.
You know, it can be made more secure easily with fewer resources and with better performance.
So, you know, for workloads that can run on either platform,
more and more, we're seeing companies are saying, you know,
we want to make the switch to Linux to open-source to Red Hat.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
I really think that Red Hat is, I mean, the way that they push pre-software into, you know,
the business world and stuff is really, really admirable.
And, I mean, they do a lot of work on Linux and they send it back up stream, right?
I mean, it's sort of a, I guess they have to use the GPL, but I mean,
you hear a lot about people at Red Hat doing a lot for a Linux segment.
Well, definitely, if you look at a lot of the open-source projects out there
and you look at the change logs for, you know, things that have been done for these programs,
you'll feel a lot of Red Hat email addresses.
And we have a lot of our engineers who are out there, you know, working on the code,
who are bringing it back to the community.
And sort of, on the other hand, you have a lot of companies like IBM,
like, you know, Oracle to a certain extent, Cisco and others that use Linux heavily
and are sort of on the forefront, and they contribute code back as well.
I mean, IBM is like one of the largest contributors to the kernel,
to the core of the Linux operating system, you know, out there.
How long have you been with Red Hat?
I've only actually been with Red Hat a little bit over a year.
So my one year anniversary was a few weeks ago.
Really? How long have you been using Linux?
I really started playing with Unix Linux-like operating systems in the late 90s.
I had a shell account for accessing the Internet and the IRC and stuff like that.
And then in college, you know, there were some hilarious engineering computers,
right? So I had some experience with that.
You know, when we had to do some of our Java programming work for classes,
you know, we had to log into the, you know, the Solaris and Unix service on the back end.
Cool. And a couple of years ago, I started playing with Linux
because I was doing some, you know, web development and other things.
So I got exposed to Red Hat there.
Cool.
And I've run everything from, you know, Stora Red Hat.
I've tried Ubuntu and been unhappy and, you know, tried Gen2 and, like, too much work.
Yeah.
So, you know, I've been around the block and I've got my RHC, my RHC certification.
So, you know, at this point, I guess I could say that I know a few things.
Yeah.
Cool. What do you do for Red Hat again?
So I'm a solutions architect for Red Hat, which means that I work between the customer
and the sales team on providing technical information, technical resources about exactly.
Yeah.
And when they have questions, more technical questions about the capabilities of, you know,
Red Hat's cluster suite or the global file system or, you know, directory server, you know,
things of that nature, when they need more information than the sales people can provide,
or when they want to, you know, understand about the total picture solution,
that, you know, all the moving parts and how they can work together.
Yeah.
Those are the things that, you know, I worked with.
Okay. Well, this, you might be the person to ask about this then.
Are there, is there anything that you personally can say that you have noted,
I guess a big noticeable gap in, you know, Red Hat or Linux,
what that would prevent people from adopting it?
Like, on the normal, like, the office level, like, an office comes to you as we want to go Linux
for our normal office running stuff.
What's missing?
Or is there anything missing?
I mean, typically the big showstoppers today are still.net applications that are written for the desktop.
Right.
So there are, there's a company in still a softest little opposition to anyway,
and a lot of Linux Fusers.
Well, but I mean, you get a lot, a lot of large companies have a lot of engineering
and, and manpower resources in betn-end.net.
It's ubiquitous, it's out there.
And companies who want to make the switch, they come to us and say, you know,
we're doing this on the desktop, what can we do?
And we're starting to see third-party players out there who actually are coming up with solutions to run.net on Linux.
And I forget the name of the company, but there's one out there that actually runs the.net as a job of ICODE
so that it actually can run on Linux.
Wow. The second thing that you use...
So it's not mono. It's something totally different.
No, totally totally different.
Wow.
The other thing that you can see sometimes is customers are using proprietary applications that just don't run on Linux.
Right, right.
And while you have things like wine that are out there that can help,
you know, wine's not something today that Red Hat has submitted to that we're shipping.
There are companies like crossover that provide support and services just like Red Hat around the open source wine.
So in some cases, that's an option for some customers.
But in other cases, they have to make a switch from either whatever program they're using
or find a way to move that program back into the data center and then access it via the web.
Oh.
So as time to see, like, accounting people are using some desktop app.
Well, that app may actually be able to be centralized with a server program
and then they can continue to do their work just with their browser.
So you kind of like virtualize the program or something?
Well, it just depends on the program.
So in some cases, you have, you know, like a suite of accounting software
that may be able to run in a client server relationship instead of just everybody runs it on their own desktop.
Gotcha.
So, you know, sometimes customers will say, well, I guess we can update our version to this newer version
which adds web browsers support because, you know, running things in the quote-unquote cloud in the data center,
I mean, that's really where most enterprises are going.
They don't want to have to worry about manipulating software on the desktop.
They want to worry about change it one and everybody actually does it from a browser.
Right.
And then, you know, everybody gets the same thing and then we only have to change one.
Yeah, it feels a lot more efficient that way anyway.
Well, cool.
That is really informative and I thank you for talking to me.
Yeah.
A big drive in the show.
All right.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio.
This is PR sponsored by Carol.net.
So, head on over to C-A-R-O-DOT-18 for all of us here.
