The Red Hat diaries

Are Linux coders and Linux companies on different paths? A slapdash new book and a recent flurry of corporate maneuvers suggest just that.

By Andrew Leonard

Oct 14, 1999 | Talk about your good timing. As the Linux marketplace revs into overdrive -- in the last week alone, one Linux hardware vendor filed to go public, a Linux distribution vendor announced that it had secured its first round of venture capital funding and a consortium of three companies declared that it will sell and support yet another version of the Linux-based operating system -- Red Hat, the preeminent U.S. Linux company, once again demonstrated its leadership. While other companies scramble for financing, Red Hat's CEO, Bob Young, has already managed to get a book published recounting his company's so-far successful struggle to turn free software into a business.

Let's hope that Red Hat's software continues to be more carefully constructed than its literary output, however. "Under the Radar: How Red Hat Changed the Software Business -- and Took Microsoft by Surprise," co-written by Young and technology journalist Wendy Goldman Rohm, is a hastily written and sloppily edited book that has all the look of a rush job timed to take advantage of Red Hat's August public offering. The narrative switches confusingly between an omniscient third person and Bob Young's own first-person voice, jumps frenetically back and forth along a five-year timeline from paragraph to paragraph and is worn down by relentlessly clunky prose: "Little did he know that the seeds were being planted for him and his future company to revolutionize the computer industry and electronic communications for businesses and consumers worldwide."

In the book, Bob Young boasts that Red Hat operates according to "Red Hat time" -- even faster than the notoriously quick-paced "Internet time." But it's possible that "Under the Radar" could have benefited from a heavier foot on the brake pedal.

Still, there's a clear advantage to being first to market -- and there are some valuable nuggets of info in "Under the Radar." Most coverage of Red Hat has historically focused on the Microsoft-versus-Red Hat story line or on the peculiarity of a company making a business out of software that is written by volunteers working for free. But most of "Under the Radar" is an account of how Red Hat convinced other corporations and potential investors to jump on the free-software bandwagon.

While there are chapters that loosely discuss the role of Linus Torvalds in creating Linux and how Netscape helped raise the market profile of free software, there's little there that hasn't been told before. What's new are the accounts of Intel's internal deliberations over how to deal with increasing Linux sentiment on the part of its customers, and the back and forth between Red Hat and companies like Dell and IBM.

What does it all add up to? Can Red Hat keep its lead? Or does the past week of frenzied Linux activity mean that the rest of the marketplace will soon be catching up?

Bob Young's book may be titled "Under the Radar," but there's no doubt today that the concept of free software has planted itself on the corporate map. Which makes it useful to look at "Under the Radar" alongside the market turmoil accompanying its publication: It then becomes obvious that -- as one Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has been following the free software/open-source software scene longer than most technology money men puts it -- "nobody really knows what's going on."

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