Q: Have you been in contact with Oracle? From your early vantage point is their Oracle Unbreakable Linux offering any sort of issue or threat to your business?

I don't want to disclose any specific meetings I've had. That's not appropriate without checking with the other sides. I will say that I've either met or will be meeting the vast majority of our partners/competitors. Being the new guy coming in, I have the opportunity to meet with folks without any historical baggage.

In terms of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux, they are out there in the market but in the last year we've retained 99 of our top 100 accounts. The only one we did not retain is Oracle itself. So yes they are out there making noise and healthy paranoia is a good thing. I certainly wouldn't want to dismiss a company that has the resource and market power of Oracle.

That said, an Oracle-specific fork of Linux is not good for Linux more broadly and ultimately not good for our joint customers. So I'm certainly trying to understand what they are doing and how we can work together instead of being at cross purposes.

Q: Are you worried at all about the upcoming release of Microsoft's Windows Server 2008? What do you have to do at Red Hat to either beat or get along with Microsoft?

Just as an observation but anytime there is a major release for a competitor's product it makes people step back and reassess. Any reassessment is good because we thing feature for feature we have a superior offering for a great many people out there.

I have no problem with Windows Server 2008. We feel good about our value proposition and our service model. So anything that makes people re-evaluate is good news from our perspective. Let's be clear - this is not a religious holy war. It's about providing the absolute best value to our customers.

If our customers want interoperability, we would like to do anything we can to promote interoperability. Interoperability needs to work around open standards and open formats. Interoperability that in the short run may look ok but that reduces choice over time and closes standards, in the end that's bad for our customers.

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We're happy to work with Microsoft or anyone else to ensure the best possible interoperability based on open standards.

Q: Are you saying then that you'd prefer an open standard to some kind of patent licensing agreement?

A patent licensing agreement is a whole different thing than do Red Hat products interoperate well with Microsoft products. We're happy to work on interoperability. The patent issue we're still not sure what it is, we've yet to see a patent we're supposedly violating.

We've asked and asked and asked and Microsoft has yet to tell us. It would be nice if they tell us at least what they are. The beauty of the open source community is that I feel very confident that is Microsoft will tell us what they [patents] are we'll work around them pretty fast.

Q: Which CEO in the technology industry or otherwise is your 'hero', the one you'd like to emulate in terms of action and/or legacy?

I'd have to say Lou Gerstner [former IBM CEO]. A lot of that is because his background and mine are somewhat similar. He came out of McKinsey as a consultant, I came out of BCG. He worked at a traditional old line of business and then came into technology.

I've done a bit of the same so certainly understanding how he made that transition - reading his book and understanding more there. I probably spend more time focusing on him. It's hard to say ok, is he the guy I most admire? I frankly haven't formed a lot of those opinions yet. But he's certainly the guy I've focused on the most, very successful with a similar background.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge in your job?

We have an incredibly successful business, which is a good thing. The bad news about that is we have to make sure we don't accept our current level of success as the best we can do.

Raging against complacency. We need to do better and we should do better as stewards of the open source world it's incumbent upon us to ensure that going forward we continue to propagate open standards and open source, continue to add value to customers, continue to be innovative and not become stale or just become - the Linux guys.

The good news is I think a lot of our people here are inspired to do that. But its easy to look back and say oh we're at the pinnacle. I don't think we're at the pinnacle now, we're just starting up the mountain and we have a long, long way to go before we've reached our full potential.

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