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Red Hat CEO: Open Source Goes Mainstream In 2014

Posted by Unknown on from the year-of-the-linux-lightbulb dept.

ashshy (40594) writes Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likes to post "state of the union" addresses at the end of every year. Last December, he said that open source innovation is going mainstream in 2014. In an interview with The Motley Fool, Whitehurst matches up his expectations against mid-year progress. Spoiler alert: It's mostly good news.

3 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. 2014 is the year of the Linux Desktop! by wiredog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just like 2013,...,1995 (when I first installed RedHat 2 from a CD)

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  2. We're already post-FOSS by TWX · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'd given this some thought since the FOSS docs discussion at the beginning of the week, and I think that we're already post-FOSS.

    FOSS' heyday was in the nineties. GNU modelled its documentation on BSD, which in turn modeled its documentation on commercial UNIX. Through the nineties developers and those that maintained distributions honored this, continuing to write their documentation like the UNIX world did, and it was easy (relatively speaking) to make the software do everything that it could do and everything that the user or sysadmin wanted it to do within those capabilities.

    Unfortunately 20 years out, rot has set-in. Projects and distributions are no longer thoroughly documented. The barrier to entry or to re-entry with anything more than using the default setup from the distribution is very, very high, much moreso than even the days when one had to do a lot more by hand.

    We're not emerging-FOSS, were already post-FOSS, at least for as long as the crappy state of sysadmin and end-user documentation is concerned, as less and less individuals will be able to make new software do what they need or want it to do. If the software won't cooperate, then commercial software suddenly becomes more attractive.

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    1. Re:We're already post-FOSS by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'd rather say that we have arrived at the point where software is complicated enough that you will have to pay for a competent (!) admin if you want to get more than the basics done. The difference between CSS and OSS is in that respect that it's way easier to pose as a halfway credible so-so admin in a CSS world with its wizards and gadgets, its online help and example config files.

      Competent OSS admins are rather rare. Because learning almost invariably means spending money and not just time.

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