Submitted by New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company must be a defining technology company of the 21st century and provide more leadership to companies that are willing to co-develop software with open source projects and with other companies. “Ninety-five percent of software is developed by enterprises each year and is not for resale,” involving a lot of re-inventing of the wheel by different firms. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted software assets each year,” he said in an address to the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Tuesday.
How did Red Hat go from being everyone’s hero, to fumbling JBoss? Red hat management doesn’t seem to understand what it takes to go big in the enterprise against the likes of IBM and Oracle, and Red Hat’s totally incapable of innovating on their own. It’s very sad. What ever happened to Solaris?
I don’t think so, RedHat is inovative (eg seam, jbossas 5, AOP) ant quite trasparent for cumunity. So the way is open, and shines quite right
Remember when everyone said that Oracle was going to kill Red Hat by undercutting them on RHEL (basically taking RHEL, dropping the Red Hat logos, adding Oracle logos, and selling it for less)? Funny how that worked out (or didn’t).
Red Hat’s doing just fine, and they are driving the development efforts that later show up in all the other Linux distros (SELinux is just one example).
Anyway, companies don’t innovate, people do. The best companies provide an environment where innovative people can be successful, whether they started their projects at that company or somewhere else.
Enterprises care primarily about their own prosperity and survival. Contributing to some grand Utopian “community” is generally nowhere on their radar. Sure, they’re willing to take code when it’s in their interest, but I question how many of them really want to give back. I mean, seriously, if they find some open source code useful, and adding a proprietary extension gives them an advantage over their competition, what incentive is there to give it back? Yes, yes, I’m sure there are people who are ideologically-driven and who believe in the principle of open source, but I see enterprises primary as consumers of open source code, not contributors.
Certainly, many might look at it that way. However, contributing the code back offloads some of the maintenance to the community at large. Much of this is not stuff that gives them a competitive advantage, except insofar as it lets them avoid some drudge work. Imagine that the “proprietary extension” is a kernel mod. I only use that as an example because there has already been a lot of discussion about the relative benefits of getting code accepted into the mainline kernel, with regards to ongoing maintenance hassle. And chances are, if your competitor is also using the same open source code, they have a similar extension. Now you’ve both invested the development efforts and are stuck with maintaining your respective branches as the software evolves, or are stuck with the version you are on. There are very practical reasons to give back. No idealism is required. Just pragmatism.
If I may be so bold, perhaps you are still looking at Open Source as some sort of communism, when in fact it rests on very capitalistic principles, where self-interest, enlightened or not, reigns.
Edited 2008-03-26 21:18 UTC
Hey, I make my living re-implementing that code! Sometimes I’ve had to re-implement the same code (for a price, of course) for the SAME COMPANY, but different business groups. They didn’t want to share with the other business groups, even though it hurt the company. It’s the American way.