Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat to Coax Code Contributions From Companies
Stony Stevenson writes "New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has hit out at enterprises, bemoaning that billions of dollars are wasted each year because 95% of companies won't share code.
Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, he said his company must take a larger role in urging enterprises to participate in open source projects and, in some cases, coax code contributions out of companies that have made in-house improvements. He now feels Red Hat should lead the way
'It should be part of Red Hat's job to define development in a new way, and get companies to work together' on shared projects, he said. The joint development projects would be designed to cover non-competitive parts of an industry, with individual companies still focused on their own competitive business applications."
I think this generally has to do with the function of the code. For example, most corporate "in-house" solutions are pressed for time and resources. Many of them are poorly documented as it is often treated as a luxury to have good documentation. Because of the nature of OSS, it typically has better documentation. Most people designing OSS hope to pass if off and allow others to build onto what they've done.
Does anyone else notice that the older group here with the lower ID numbers, is starting to agree that open source is kind of losing it's way when it comes to stuff like this, and the the new crowd with the higher IDs seems to think that everything and everyone should give away their stuff for free? Kids these days, and their free mp3 mentalities.
The joint development projects would be designed to cover non-competitive parts of an industry, with individual companies still focused on their own competitive business applications.
No such thing as non-competitive parts of an industry. If two companies say, make toilet paper, and one of them has a custom program that let's say, saves energy by turning off unused lights in their buildings. That company saves money on their power bill. That is still a competitive advantage over the other company, even though it has nothing to do with the industry. Why would the company that developed that give that to a competitor, and allow that competitor to improve their bottom line? Every piece of doing business is a competitive advantage. There are no insignificant parts of any business.
I don't respond to AC's.
If only software development was like that! If a software solution for a given problem exists (closed or open source), that still does not mean the problem is solved once and for all. The implementation is hardly ever isolated from the rest of the "product". Even in the open-source world, we still have these large, monolithic programs, and nobody has a chance of reusing just a certain aspect of them. In fact, in some cases it's even worse than with commercial software: Just think of all the applications that exist twice: Once in a KDE version and once in GNOME version.
Until all code is truly reusable and free of everything non-problem-related, programmers will reinvent the wheel over and over again.
If you contribute back to a F/OSS project, such project grows and attracts new contributors, who will in turn give you stuff for free.
Win/win.
Hardware companies care only about selling a product and keeping the customer satisfied for the first 30 days after which they can't return the said hardware. They don't care if the patches to Linux don't get upstream because as long as the hardware works fine with the version of Linux that they hacked up and pre-loaded, they're customers will be temporarily satisfied.
And when it comes time to upgrade the Linux OS in a year or two, the new version won't work, so the customers will be forced to buy more "up-to-date" hardware with more hacks and band aids. Even presumably FOSS-friendly companies like System76 change the pre-installed Ubuntu on their laptops by adding tons of hacks and then don't bother to even report them upstream, much less to develop a sustainable solution.
See the following threads on the System76 forum:
Real Linux drivers for System76 laptops, NO thanks to System76
Merge System76 Driver with upstream kernel and HAL