Red Hat In Boston, Part 1.0: A Community GatheringRed Hat In Boston, Part 1.0: A Community Gathering

The big first topic of the morning as I headed downstairs for the first day of the Red Hat Summit in Boston wasn't virtualization or kernel optimizations, but the Celtics trouncing the Lakers. I'd heard the street-level mayhem for that victory from 20 floors up at just before midnight (mainly, endless car horns honking) and had called the front desk in a half-panic to make sure it wasn't an incipient natural disaster. With that out of the way and my program guide, complementary backpack, free Fedora 9 live media and bonus 1 GB jump-drive (attached to my badge lariat), I followed the rest of the early birds for the opening keynotes.

First up on the podium, Red Hat's president of products and marketing, Paul Cormier, who used (and stressed) the word community at least five times during his speech. "It's your platform," he told the audience, one where "the best ideas win."

Red Hat's recently minted CEO Jim Whitehurst stepped up with a similarly themed talk, "You're our developers, our testers, and our community" -- yup, that word again. I couldn't help but think that an audience hearing a line like that from a non-open source company wouldn't feel particularly flattered (viz., how we're all de facto Microsoft beta-testers). Here, though, it's a slightly different story, and with that Jim firmly underscored Red Hat's position.

"We are the leaders in open source -- period, full stop -- and we will continue to be. Open source is not about a marketing campaign, or a license -- for us, open source is what we are and it pervades what we do. We will continue to be consistent in that." He cited as an example their recently concluded patent settlement (our story about it), which not only protects them but everyone else upstream and downstream from them, including competitors. (I'd assume folks like Novell, rather than Sun or Microsoft, are the ones that fall most squarely into that category.)

Jim also expressed high hopes for open source development as a way to reduce duplicated work within organizations. Why write apps from scratch that will never be used outside your organization when there may well be an open source project out there that already does everything you need and more? One specific example he cited was SELinux, originally created under very closed-ended circumstances. "It's up to us to do a better job of communicating open source as a commercial and development model," he stated, again underscoring development as the big thing, not commerce.

It's all strong evidence that Red Hat plans to keep its street cred as an open source luminary. That said, I hope this attitude of "the community has so much they could be sharing with everyone" doesn't devolve into "the community has so much to share with us." I've seen that attitude manifest amongst the developers of one fairly major open source project, and it's never pretty -- but Red Hat had, and has, a lot more to lose than those folks.

The other two keynotes were less immediately RH-relevant, but still interesting: Dr. John Halamka, the fourth human being to have his genome fully sequenced (I wonder if he has that on his business cards?) talked about using open source and open standards -- with Red Hat as part of that, of course -- to reduce waste and costs when dealing with electronic medical records. IBM's Jim Stalling, the fellow who essentially germinated Linux within IBM, talked about using open source to reduce data center and infrastructure costs. (One eyebrow-raising tidbit he dropped: Save $1 in energy costs in a data center and you can allegedly save up to $6-$8 elsewhere.)

I'll be posting later in the day about some of the breakout sessions. See you in the p.m.