All Red Hat "applications" do not have to be open source software (OSS) - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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October 08, 2007
All Red Hat "applications" do not have to be open source software (OSS)

Red Hat’s statistics-based announcement on October 4 that it has a “rapidly growing portfolio of certified ISV applications that customers can select to run– 3,000 certified applications” actually highlights a major problem.

Those are not primarily applications by anyone else’s definition of the word, not software that accountants, architects, bank clerks, clinicians and so forth touch on a daily basis. Close to 90% of the applications according to the charts released by Red Hat are infrastructure software used by IT developers or systems administrators. As I pointed out here in another context, the IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and so forth ecosystems include thousands of actual end-user applications and can be measured in the billions of dollars in revenue.

Red Hat is trying to reverse that proportion through the Red Hat Exchange (RHX). Red Hat desperately needs a real applications ecosystem to kick in from RHX before the larger companies catch up to Red Hat in embracing open source software (OSS). They are already well on their way to the point that any market research that tries to bifurcate the software market between OSS and proprietary is already flawed. On the positive side, that ecosystem does not have to include only OSS applications. All applications—whatever the development model and/or terms and conditions of their licenses--which run on an OSS stack, will help Red Hat. The Red Hat stack consisting of RHEL and the assortment of middleware it has built up via the JBoss and Metamatrix acquisitions is its leading advantage.

Another success factor pointed out by Red Hat is the API/ABI (application programming/binary interface) stability that is an important element of every Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. ISVs do not need to keep re-certifying their products and customers do not need to keep installing updates to keep them running.