Jim Whitehurst

I started thinking about the value of information here in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held May 21-22. It's the first day of a two-day conference, and some of the leading experts in open source are here presenting, learning, networking and more. During the opening remarks by John Amato, Vice President & Publisher, Computerworld, and Matt Asay, Vice President Business Development, Nodeable, we discovered that about half the attendees are new to the conference, which is great for open source.

The first keynote speaker was Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO, Red Hat. Whitehurst focused his talk on » Read more

LinuxCon 2011 kicked off this morning with a retrospective from Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, on the accomplishments of Linux in its first twenty years. Self-professed geek and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose Linux use started with Slackware in the late 90s, followed by Fedora, followed Zemlin with a keynote addressing the next 20 years of Linux. » Read more

Today The Linux Foundation announces the lineup of speakers for this year's LinuxCon North America, and we're pretty happy to see a lot of opensource.com contributors on the agenda. As a part of the event, the foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linux through various activities, including a LinuxCon keynote by Linus Torvalds. » Read more

20th century companies defined success by their hard assets. In contrast, 21st century businesses are based around information and ideas. In this video, Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, explores how we add value in today's contemporary business, and, by extension, as a society.

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So 19 months into the Open Government Directive, we seem to have a backlash. The government has spent millions of dollars collecting, organizing, and cataloging its data to make it more available to the public. An unprecedented effort. Some of this data is frivolous, some of it is valuable, but I think we can all agree that more transparency is always — always — a good thing. » Read more

In his keynote speech at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the case that of the $1.3 trillion USD spent in 2009 on Enterprise IT globally, $500 billion was essentially wasted (due to new project mortality and Version 2.0-itis). Moreover, because the purpose of IT spending is to create value (typically $6-$8 for each $1 of IT spend), the $500 billion waste in enterprise IT spending translates to $3.5 trillion of lost economic value. He goes on to explain that with the right innovations—in software business models, software architectures, software technologies, and applications—we can get full value from the money that's being wasted today, reinforcing the thesis that innovation trumps cost savings.

But then along comes Accenture's Chief Technology Architect Paul Daugherty, and in his keynote he presents a list of the top five reasons that customers choose open source software (which is now up to 78% among their customers):

#1 (76%): better quality than proprietary software.

#5 (54%): lower total cost of ownership.

So which is it? Does innovation trump cost savings? Or does quality trump cost savings?

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A few weeks ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote an article for BusinessWeek suggesting that Toyota might benefit from doing things the open source way when it comes to building the software inside its automobiles.

From Jim's article: » Read more

Here at opensource.com, we aspire to take principles the open source software movement has applied to building better software faster and find more uses for them in business, education, government, the law, and generally in our lives. » Read more

Dave Cole, Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, presented an awesome keynote to more than 3,000 attendees at DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 on April 21. His keynote was about open source in government, and he talked about how whitehouse.gov has become a platform to foster citizen participation. Although I found the technology part interesting, it was the philosophy and open source principles that Dave talked about that are enabling the executive branch of the United States government to be more open and transparent. » Read more

Companies that are creating massive value typically aren’t building a better mousetrap. They’re not improving on existing technologies or simply adding new features. Instead, they’re changing the business model. This was the message behind Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s keynote at today’s CED Venture 2010 Conference.  » Read more