Interviewing, ‘Free and Open’ Style...

You could call it a ‘free and open’ style interview. The collaborative model of building software recently touched the world of journalism! A network of Free/Libre and Open Source enthusiasts, called the Mumbai_GNULinux network on Yahoogroups.com brought their heads together to decide on what to ask Red Hat (India) director Javed Tapia. By the time the interview was done, it was also circulated to the North India, Roorkee IIT and Jodhpur FLOSS networks. Here are some extracts from the interview, done collaboratively at the initiative of Kunal Bharati and edited by Frederick Noronha

What initiatives has Red Hat taken for Linux in India?
Red Hat has been at the forefront of evangelising the use of open source and Linux in India. It has been working closely with the government and the corporate sector towards educating them about the benefits of adopting Linux as the platform for deploying corporate applications.

Simultaneously, keeping the home user in mind, it also launched extremely user-friendly Linux distributions of the likes of Red Hat Linux 8.0 last year and Red Hat Linux 9 (in June). The corporate world can now use open source in the form of Linux in all areas of enterprise computing.

Red Hat has launched a family of products for the enterprise called Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For any technology to succeed, an ecosystem requires to be created to nurture the technology and help it mature. Red Hat has been working extremely hard to ensure this, by getting its enterprise products certified by OEMs, and having ISVs develop their range of applications on Red Hat Linux.

By training people and helping them obtain Red Hat certifications, partnering with professional technology and IT training companies all across India and helping governments and schools go open source, Red Hat has helped in its own small ways take Linux to the enterprise.

Is Red Hat utilising Indian technical skills sufficiently? How?
Red Hat’s policy is to grow with skill sets internally and over time grow in numbers with growth in business opportunities. Red Hat does value its employees, both technical and non-technical. The average techie at Red Hat is about 25 years old and comes to Red Hat from various locations across the country. Each employee brings in his/her area of specialisation and helps take the company to greater heights. Their contributions are towards Red Hat’s engineering, product development and professional consulting and business aspects.

India still has a considerable installed base of older, less powerful machines. What attempts are being made to ensure such users are not hit by the heavy resource demands of recent distributions?
At Red Hat we always endeavour towards delivering the best that open source has to offer. Towards achieving this objective, Red Hat is forced to keep up with the best and latest developments on the desktop front. In spite of the huge processing demands of the latest open-source applications, Red Hat makes sure that it has all the options available via its Installer to allow for suitable customisation for any low-end x86 box.

But isn’t Red Hat too going the bloatware way?
Bloatware in essence depends on one’s point of view. Bloatware applications generally are those which get labelled thus for hogging huge disk space and memory resources. As mentioned previously, we work towards delivering the best and latest in terms of open-source innovations to the consumer on the desktop. Applications and their feature sets galore (which are also given) add to the size of the whole distribution.

Over the years, the final size of the Red Hat consumer operating systems have increased dramatically. But one shouldn’t fail to notice the evolution of Linux on the desktop purely due to the fact that distributions like Red Hat have endeavoured to deliver the latest and the best to the customer. In spite of it all, Red Hat provides the customer the choice of making an appropriate stripped down selection of packages.

How have state governments here reacted to open-source software?
Governments have shown considerable interest in open source and Linux in particular. Recently it was heartening to hear the President of India too give a call to all Indians to go the open source way. In fact, we are currently working with Madhya Pradesh Treasuries and Maharashtra Land Records, among other projects. There are a whole lot of project implementations by DIT for Mantralaya, which run on Red Hat Linux. We also recently signed an MoU with NICSI (the procurement arm of governments) to develop a mechanism towards delivering quantifiable services.

What has been the response of users to Linux as a business tool?
Extremely good. Lots of organisations are using open source, not only as cost-saving tools but also for better performance. Business users today have a choice and don’t need to get locked into one vendor.

Why does Linux seem to be taking such a long time to capture the market?
Linux initially did not have any organisation to take responsibility for the software. This was critical for business users. Red Hat helped solved that problem. Also, taking on a well-entrenched player in any market takes time. An ecosystem also needs to be created, which doesn’t happen overnight. For example, if you send a spreadsheet created in Open Office, that receiver needs to be able to read and react. This was not possible till a while back and in some cases even now because of blocking strategies of market leaders.

What is your endeavour to spread FLOSS in schools?
A considerable number of schools have begun to use Linux as a network server, Internet gateway, router or desktop operating system. With the recent enormous growth of interest in Linux, this usage is certain to accelerate. Red Hat offers a radical alternative to the way schools have traditionally used computers—an alternative that is attractive in terms of cost, stability, control and security.

How many people do you employ in India?
About 30 people. Linux and its army of (often volunteer) developers is something even a company of the likes of Microsoft can’t hire. I know you understand this better than me... that it’s not always about money.

Any plans to make your product more affordable by Indian standards?
Our products are affordable by Indian standards and we will constantly endeavour to offer them at the best possible price.

What steps are you taking to bring Linux to home desktops where pirated software flourishes?
We are launching desktop OS versions every six months with better applications. We will also launch a Hindi version of Red Hat down the line.