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Red Hat Backs Away From WideOpenNews Posted by Dale Dougherty, 5/12/00 at 10:42:27 AM. As described in a recent CNET story, RedHat is backing away from its commitment to the Open Source news site, WideOpenNews, less than one year after opening the site. The move, which resulted in the layoff of three of the four staffers, was made to refocus the mission of the company and its web sites. No doubt the fall of RedHat's stock price was causing a sober evaluation of the company's ambitions. RedHat must have decided that providing news and information for the open source community was aiming wide of the mark of its core technical support and service business. In filing for its IPO, RedHat considered publishing a valuable service they could provide, one which they expected to be very profitable. It was, after all, part of the unproven formula for making money off free software. Perhaps Microsoft's Slate served as a precedent for RedHat. Launching WideOpenNews was a statement that RedHat had deep pockets to hire a team of journalists. It was also an interesting experiment, seemingly doomed to fail, that a major player in a market could own and operate a site intended to serve as the independent voice of the market. I had recently met with Russ Mitchell, a very likable and well-regarded technical journalist who has been Editor-in-Chief of WideOpenNews. He had then just taken over responsibility for the RedHat.com web site as well. He said he had struggled at times with the corporate structure and culture at RedHat but that for the most part, they left him alone. Too alone, it seems. Calls to his office extension don't seem to work nor is he listed in the company's San Francisco office directory. When WideOpenNews was launched, I thought that RedHat's entering into publishing was questionable, wondering if they really had the stomach for a business that is very different from the software business. The same problem may someday face VA Linux, which has acquired Andover.net, the parent company of Slashdot. The big difference, however, may be that Andover is a pretty complete media company itself, with enough heft in terms of audience mindshare and advertising dollars that it can actually function independently. However, I don't think that a company whose job it is to develop software (or hardware) will really appreciate a publishing or media business. It's too different. Can they be mixed together? Netscape is a great example. Once the founders of Netscape realized that they could no longer win the browser wars as a software company, they evolved into a media company. NetCenter became the major profit center, not servers or tools. So it was only natural to be acquired by AOL, a company that really likes the business of selling eyeballs. Who knows, maybe VA Linux will end up becoming a media company instead of an engineering company. Maybe RedHat will re-commit itself to becoming a great engineering company. But it's clear that Linux companies are still like teenagers who while living well are still trying to grow up and figure out who they want to be.

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