Red Hat chief calls for open source missionary work Customers who remain only halfhearted open source converts aren't doing enough for Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. At his opening keynote at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Whitehurst said the company needs to start preaching to its customers to share their internally developed code with others. "The vast majority of software …
I sort of understand the community "share-and-share" alike mentality of the open source movement, but it never ceases to amaze me that businesses are truly expected to share the internally developed software with others. What's the point of being in business if you give your product away?
Seems to me the only way to work it sustainably would be to have the best marketing, but lets face it - 99.98% of the developers of open source software couldn't market or sell themselves out of bed, much less a successful marketing campaign. It looks like the open saucers are taking their core competencies and throwing them right out the window.
I hope most of them find jobs when the communes have closed and everyone has returned to the real world.
For businesses who need to write some software, but that software isn't a key competitive advantage for them, it makes perfect sense to open source. There's no 'warm and fuzzy' about this - the business gets a big advantage because the software is maintained and enhanced for them, and the business gets these benefits for free or for only a very minimal cost.
Jim Whitehurst's example was Red Hat MRG, originally developed by JP Morgan, and open sourced. Now JP Morgan is not some sort of hippy-dippy peace and love outfit. They did it for very practical financial reasons, and now have the benefit of getting back a supported, open source product (Red Hat MRG) which has been developed (outside JP) to the point where it's better and faster than the proprietary competition. And it's only going to get better in future. And JP Morgan get to use all that innovation for nothing.
"What's the point of being in business if you give your product away?"
This isn't talking about products that they sell, it is about internally developed and used software. This software could be expanded for use in other areas and become useful to other entities.
Most of this internally developed software gets to the point where the developer/company wants it to be and development stops whilst the software just does its job. This could be passed out to the development community and expanded into areas that weren't originally envisaged by its developers. This is free software improvement and upkeep for the original company that had the forsight to pass development of the software to the open source community.
"99.98% of the developers of open source software couldn't market or sell themselves out of bed, much less a successful marketing campaign."
Well, 99.98% of goat herders couldn't either. Why do developers need to be good at marketing? They are developers, not marketers. Leave the marketing for those that do it.
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