Interviews: Ask Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst A Question (redhat.com)

Jim Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008, as its valuation rose past $10 billion and the company entered the S&P 500. He believes that leaders should engage people, and then provide context for self-organizing, and in 2015 even published The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (donating all proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation). The book describes a post-bureaucratic world of community-centric companies led with transparency and collaboration, with chapters on igniting passion, building engagement, and choosing meritocracy over democracy.

Jim's argued that Red Hat exemplifies "digital disruption," and recently predicted a world of open source infrastructure running proprietary business software. Fortune has already called Red Hat "one of the geekiest firms in the business," and their open source cloud computing platform OpenStack now competes directly with Amazon Web Services. Red Hat also sponsors the Fedora Project and works with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick out the very best questions, and then forward them on for answers from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.

Comments

The plans for CentOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that CentOS has received a more official status in the RH world, what are the plans for the project?

Proprietary driver support

[ARos]

Hi Jim,

    Many proprietary hardware vendors continue not to take the Linux desktop and workstation markets seriously. Recall, e.g., Linus's rant against nvidia. As a leader in the Linux and FOSS communities, what will you do to persuade major vendors to write and maintain functional drivers for RHEL and Fedora?

Thank you,

  - A.

Why isn't Linux on the desktop more widespread?

[snooo53]

I'm curious your thoughts on why Linux hasn't grabbed more laptop/desktop marketshare from Windows and MacOS over the years? It seems that with the privacy concerns around Windows 10 and Apple's lack of focus on MacOS there may be a huge opportunity in the near future. What things need to happen in the consumer marketplace and within the OSS community for it to really take off? Can 2017 be the year of the Linux desktop?