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Red Hat CEO Talks About State Of Open Source (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the looking-forward dept.

To mark Red Hat's 25th anniversary, TechCrunch spoke with the company's CEO Jim Whitehurst to talk about the past, present and future of the company, and open-source software in general. An excerpt: "Ten years ago, open source at the time was really focused on offering viable alternatives to traditional software," he told me. "We were selling layers of technology to replace existing technology. [...] At the time, it was open source showing that we can build open-source tech at lower cost. The value proposition was that it was cheaper." At the time, he argues, the market was about replacing Windows with Linux or IBM's WebSphere with JBoss. And that defined Red Hat's role in the ecosystem, too, which was less about technological information than about packaging. "For Red Hat, we started off taking these open-source projects and making them usable for traditional enterprises," said Whitehurst.

About five or six ago, something changed, though. Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because they didn't look at some of the infrastructure technologies they opened up as competitive advantages. Instead, having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that. "The biggest part is it's not just Google and Facebook finding religion," said Whitehurst. "The social tech around open source made it easy to make projects happen. Companies got credit for that." He also noted that developers now look at their open-source contributions as part of their resume. With an increasingly mobile workforce that regularly moves between jobs, companies that want to compete for talent are almost forced to open source at least some of the technologies that don't give them a competitive advantage.
In October, Whitehurst also answered questions from Slashdot readers.

6 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Has ruined the Linux ecosystem. Is this the garbage that RH is proud of?

    1. Re:Systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Monolithic systemd-based systems are harder to maintain and debug in many cases. But even more problematic is the difficulty to vary and switch components, to experiment and try out new things, since systemd "swallows" so much of your base system. Also, a small group of people have effective control over this key part of the system.

    2. Re:Systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yep, if I wanted some black box that's a pain in the ass to debug, I'd just use a docker container. Systemd makes linux much less attractive. Like having herpes.

  2. Re:How do these companies profit? by pr0fessor · · Score: 4, Informative

    My best guess is that having and using these as a standard allows more applications to easily connect to their services. Microsoft's open source projects and other non-commercial products tend to be targeted at bringing in more developers for the windows family products or management tools that make adopting microsoft easier.

  3. Re:How do these companies profit? by slack_justyb · · Score: 5, Informative

    When you create an in-house library, you have to have your folks do documentation, train new employees to the library, have your people not only develop off that library but patch it as well. Now that's not everything there but those are some major tick marks in the world. Open Sourcing reduces those to different degrees. However, it's not a panacea. It's important to have a business model based on a service and then open source the tools you use to have new hires already up to speed on what you all do before they get in the door.

    That doesn't make you money, but it saves you money. However, it all means nothing if you don't have a service to sell first.

  4. Re:Whitehurst: one of FOSS' greatest heroes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Whitehurst is no contributor to open source. He hasn't done s**t for Linux, except for the fact that he allowed/allows the systemd scourge to continue -- and he avoids dealing with the issue when someone confronts him with it.

    Not sure why you brought up Shuttleworth, but at least he actually helped Linux and open source somewhat by heavily promoting Ubuntu. On the other hand, he definitely has had serious lapses in judgement by accepting systemd into Ubuntu, and by suddenly killing several promising projects (such as Unity).