CIQ[1] is a relatively new company. Its leadership, however, has deep roots in open-source software and Linux. Besides Gregory M. Kurtzer, CIQ's co-founder and CEO, who was a creator of CentOS[2], the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)[3] clone, its new executive team[4] -- announced Wednesday -- boasts two of the founders of Linuxcare[5], the first company to make supporting Linux a priority.
Today, the first business model that comes to mind for Linux or open-source software is to offer paid business support. It wasn't always that way. In Linux's early days, companies such as Caldera[6], Red Hat[7], and SUSE[8] still thought you could make money by selling Linux in a box to ordinary users.
Before Red Hat figured this out, when it retired Red Hat Linux in favor of the commercial RHEL in 2003[9], Linuxcare had already emerged as the first important Linux support company in 1998. Unfortunately, business problems and the dot-com crash didn't allow Linuxcare[10] to become a top company. As the saying goes, first movers lose, second movers win[11].
But, that water is well over the dam now. Today, former Linuxcare founders Art Tyde, CIQ's VP of business development, and David LaDuke, VP of marketing, bring decades of hard-won experience to the table. Other well-known veteran technology leaders such as Robert Adolph, co-founder and chief product officer; Rob Dufalo, SVP of engineering; John Frey, CTO; Stephen Moody, SVP support and technology; Marlin Prager, CFO; and Brock Taylor, VP of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and strategic partners,