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Red Hat CEO Talks About State Of Open Source (techcrunch.com)
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.
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.
Not a fan of systemd, but how has it ruined the ecosystem? I see a continued rise with Linux taking over just about everything.
Open Source Software especially the GNU variety, tends to limit on ways people can profit off of GNU Software (Where selling the actual software is near impossible when people can get it legally for free).
Now what the cloud did was having this software for free, but who really cares, because you can put it in a server farm data center mega infrastructure, and you just pay for the computing that you use. Sure you can have the software and its source, because chances are you will not have the millions of dollars to implement the massive data center to fully utilize it.
Where a decade back. We were operating with small server farms (normally for a fair size organization) having a couple of racks of servers where each one was doing one or two jobs. Meaning the software sales were important, because people are not going to pay a monthly fee to run it on their servers, when they can buy the software and the servers themselves and run it over a long period of time.
So Open Source is more palatable because it doesn't conflict with their business model.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Linux was already strong and rising, and systemd was/is a corrupt, polluting and aggressive attempt to take over Linux in that rise.
The utterly arbitrary, hard-coded dependencies to systemd that were created overnight are some of the many signs of the corruption. The way that systemd was railroaded through Debian is another indication of the corruption.
A lot of folks have moved to BSD, but we are starting to see somewhat of a recovery from the systemd scourge, with more substantial Linux distros adopting other inits.