When Red Hat Inc announced its support for open source software packages other than its Linux distribution, commentators wondered how its rivals would view the move. In particular, there was speculation that messaging start-up Sendmail Inc would be harmed by Red Hat’s decision to support Sendmail’s eponymously named flagship product. President and CEO Greg Olsen says that just isn’t the case: I would like to very actively quash that rumor, he told ComputerWire. We really welcome the support they’re providing to the Sendmail community. There are many, many people running Sendmail on Red Hat Linux and clearly that one-stop support is the right solution for many of them. Olsen pointed out that as hardworking a 100-person company as Sendmail is, The fundamental reality is that it would be physically impossible for us to scale to support all of our users. There is this unmet need.
Besides, Olsen says, the two companies are focused on very different markets. Sendmail’s typical customer is a hard-core commercial organization which, while it recognizes the need for an industrial-strength messaging system, is not really an early adopter of open source software. In other words, Sendmail the company was established to package and sell Sendmail the open source program as if it were proprietary software. Red Hat’s mission is quite different. As the company has grown, it has become something of an evangelist for all open source software. Its typical customer tends to be a convert, a company that recognizes the advantages of the open source development methodology.
There are a lot of different approaches, Olsen argues. He points out that open source software is in an exponential growth phase. Nobody can keep up with the demand, he says. The market will mature, and the natural way it matures is that people will pick their specializations. The bottom line is that as more and more specialized support becomes available, open source software will become more and more credible to the enterprise. The primary challenge for those of us that believe in open source is meeting the needs of our customers, he concludes. Without good support, this isn’t a solution.
