red hat

“That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.”
—Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

Back in September I was lucky enough to participate in IBM's centennial THINK forum in New York City . The lineup included a staggering array of CEOs of the biggest, oldest, and most influential companies in the world, several heads of state (on loan from the General Assembly sessions at the UN across town), and a handful of boldface journalists and thought leaders. For all of the power on display in that room, the real topic of the moment was insurrection. » Read more

In my first week at Red Hat, having come from a long history of using proprietary software in the corporate workplace, it only took a few hours to wash away more than fifteen years of plugging overly long license codes into software before I could sit down and use it. What had become second nature during those years vanished the moment I began using an open source desktop. » Read more

Open source software has been referred to as a "gift economy," one where valuable goods and services are exchanged without the expectation of payment. That’s fine, so far as it goes, but when it comes to businesses involved with open source software, I think the term "reputation economy” is more accurate. » Read more

Here on opensource.com, we often talk about the benefits of an open, collaborative approach, and I see new stories every day that help showcase the benefits of an open organizational model.

But for public companies, the benefits of an open approach are often overshadowed by the risks. During my time at Red Hat (a publicly-traded company for much of my tenure), our approach was traditionally to "default to open," sharing as much information as we could, both inside the company and with the outside world. » 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

In part 1 of this post, Bob Young talked about his history as a typewriter salesman, Red Hat's beginnings, and how we are all collaborative by nature. In the second part, below, he talks about his current company, Lulu, publishing, and more about collaborative innovation. » Read more

In my role as Red Hat’s brand manager, I am always on the look out for interesting and provocative readings about brands and branding in general. Inside the technology industry, outside the technology industry – it’s all good. There’s something to be learned from every great case study, thought piece, theory, and brand story. » Read more

Like many, I was surprised-but-not-really when Pamela Jones announced that she would be retiring original content on the legal analysis site that grew to fame within and without the open source community as it rose to do battle with the incredibly audacious claims by The SCO Group that Linux was directly derived from UNIX. » Read more

Gene Quinn's recent post titled "What Happened to the Obama Open Source Initiative?" criticizes, in turns, open source software, Scott McNealy, the Obama administration, and "business newbies" who want to use the open source software model. » Read more

NASA has been implementing an Open Government Plan for nearly a year, and this week they held the first NASA Open Source Summit in Mountain View, CA. But the roots of open source at NASA go back much further, to its founding legislation in 1958, which designed NASA as a source that would "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information"--a goal perfectly suited to an open approach. » Read more