Community Matters

I’m at OSBC this week; maybe the only open source conference that I attend that has on it’s invitation email the note “business attire requested”. It’s an interesting conference, one that really tries to focus on the non-techie aspects of open source. Lots of execs and manager types in the audience - and the only true geeks and developers than I ran into so far are speakers (so am I - I’m part of a panel on the future of operating systems later this morning).

Matt Asay opened the conference with a good dose of the usual (all kinds of statistics that show just how much the industry embraces open source) and a bit of the unusual (a video spoof that he did on his Mac trying to show the inevitability of open source’s success - note to Matt: video editing is really hard - that’s why people get paid a lot of money to do it… also, did you have valid license to use the music and images / video clips? After all this conference has lots of lawyers in its audience…). But don’t get me wrong, it was a good opener and it got people in the right mindset for Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst who gave the opening keynote.

It’s very interesting to hear a non-insider speak about the open source industry. Jim was the COO for Delta airlines before he joined Red Hat at the beginning of this year. Lots of what he says is the standard marketing fair that you are used to from Red Hat execs (his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, spoke here last year). But if you pay attention, there are a few new topics tipping up. When he talks about service he seems a lot more comfortable with the model and much more focused on the customer needs. That’s expected. What surprised me was his explanation of how customers are actually participating in the development. His logic? 75% of all software is written as in house apps. So almost all big customers have plenty of developers. And for many of them it makes business sense to have a few developers on staff who participate in the community building the software that they actually use.

Makes perfect sense, but it’s the first time that I heard an open source CEO speak openly about the power of community in this context - not the “anonymous developers” out there whose work they leverage, but their own customers as part of that community. Very interesting.

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?