Red Hat

Red Hat announced a partnership with Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN).com Wednesday to offer its latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 as a beta service through Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. The online Amazon service supplies an expandable, on-call computer resources to users who seek to scale up their applications without building out their data center.

Red Hat's partnership with Amazon was just one aspect of a multi-pronged initiative, dubbed Linux Automation.

I'm wearing a very special hat today to celebrate the official release of Fedora 8, the latest version of the community-driven Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat. Codenamed Werewolf, this release serves up some very impressive new features and includes a new visual style.

SOFTWARE maker Red Hat, which had planned to introduce a new version of its Linux software for personal computers in August, said that the product won't be out until next month at the earliest.
The rival to Microsoft's Windows and Novell's Suse Linux, which Red Hat plans to sell in developing countries, had previously been pushed back to a September launch.

Red Hat said on Thursday it will delay the August release of its Global Desktop Linux software. It will now not be available until September, product manager Gerry Riveros told Reuters in an email.

The product includes Linux operating-system software and other compatible programs for desktop and laptop personal computers.

Tough competition appears to be driving profits down for Red Hat but the company has hung on to one marquee customer, Yahoo, despite recent reports to the contrary.

Profits were down in Red Hat's fiscal fourth quarter, ended Feb. 28, to US$20.5 million from US$27.3 million in the same quarter last year.

Red Hat is under increasing pressure from competitors including Oracle, which now offers a support program for users of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, and Microsoft, which poses a new threat through its relationship with Novell.

Red Hat released the latest version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) flagship product today with a flurry of new features, upgrades and improvements.

The RHEL 5 release comes as Red Hat faces a multi-front battle in the operating systems space against rivals Microsoft, Novell and Oracle. In this release, Red Hat is touting new virtualization, security, storage and application options that it hopes will keep it ahead of competitors making a run for Red Hat's market share.

KVM, a new virtualization technology that lets Linux computers run multiple operating systems simultaneously, has won a significant endorsement from Red Hat.

Red Hat, the dominant Linux seller, will include KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) in the next version of its hobbyist Linux version, Fedora, Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens said Tuesday. "We're packaging it for Fedora 7," Stevens said.

Red Hat has had something of a bumpy ride in the last two months. First, Oracle launched a competitive threat to the open-source supplier, then Microsoft inked a deal with Linux distributor Novell. As right-hand man to Red Hat's chief executive Matthew Szulik, Alex Pinchev has access to a lot of the strategic insights afforded to his boss, but is unencumbered by the diplomatic restraints placed on the chief executive. He speaks his mind.

Oracle will offer support for the Red Hat Linux distribution, the company's chief executive Larry Ellison said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference.

"There is a lack of true enterprise support for the Linux operating system. This has slowed the adoption of Linux," Ellison said in a keynote presentation.

"This isn't about competing with Red Hat. This is about increasing the adoption of Linux in the enterprise."

Volunteer hackers still play an important role in open-source software development despite the many companies that pay developers to work on open-source products, according to Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's vice president of open source affairs.