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By Tom Sheehan
According to a recent interview between Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and the WSJ.com. open source computing is not going away any time soon. The desire of legions of developers to continually develop and improve upon software such as Apache, MySQL, and Linux OS is a real testament to universal desires to demonstrate mastery of one skills. Herd mentality that drives innovation in the open source space is as strong today as it was ten years ago.
Below are some of the highlights of the conversation with Red Hat, an innovator in the open source community.
User collaboration is an important part of the future, not only for technology companies but for the business world at large. Software - especially open source software that will facilitate that process is poised to do well.
As developing countries like China upgrade older mainframe systems, Mr. Whitehurst says, open-source software is poised to grow rapidly. The advent of cloud computing—in which data and applications are stored remotely and accessed over the Internet, potentially making collaboration simpler—is another potential open-source opportunity.
When asked how is the market for open-source software in Asia different, Mr. Whitehurst replied," I think uniquely what's interesting in Asia is for the first time in this paradigm shift, the incumbents aren't ahead. The incumbents have no lead because it's users driving it. So the opportunity for a whole new set of companies to emerge as the leaders is happening now, and I think when we look at where there's great opportunity, there's great opportunity in Asia, because frankly you have governments who are sophisticated and understand this. Red Hat, our mission is to catalyze communities, so we see a huge opportunity to work to build an ecosystem around a whole set of open source projects that exist, and ones that don't even exist yet."
When asked about information sharing and collaboration in the future, Mr. Whitehurst said, "This is going to radically change the way institutions are managed. The Facebook generation is used to collaborating, and they're used to a meritocracy. It will change work structures and the nature of the corporation. Most problems can be solved by massive collaboration."
What is Red Hat's Cloud strategy going forward? Mr. Whitehurst, " We see ourselves as the arms dealers to the clouds. Amazon and IBM are using our technologies, so I actually look at Amazon as a great partner of ours. The reason we'll win is not because we're smart, but because we're taking open-source code. It's not my vision, but the vision of the people who are running the largest data centers in the world. We help facilitate it and bring it to market. We're not being led by vendors but being led by users. I think the world's moving in our direction."
Asia, Open Source Development, the Cloud, and Collaboration - all important themes in computing that will continue to grow in relevance in the decades to come.
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