Sharing the open source experience
Since joining the Red Hat company I’ve been introduced and experienced first-hand the impact and power of open source. This blog covers the basics and hopefully gets you started on learning more about how open source can be an incredibly powerful business model and community supporting path.
Why Open Source
First, we have to discuss why you should choose open source software. Richard Stallman coined the idea of “free software” and believed Open Source would give users the freedom to share, study and modify software. He established the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation and developed the GNU Manifesto to state how business models could be based around the maintenance and distribution of free software. This lead to the creation of the GNU Operating System, which Linus Torvalds used in creating the Linux kernel. Ultimately Stallman and Torvalds paved the way for Red Hat. Below lists the benefits of open source software.
- Transparency
- Open exchange of ideas
- Rapid prototyping (fail fast)
- Developers are also users of the product
- Less bugs with open source model
- Collaboration
- Community participation
- Meritocracy to reward the best ideas, regardless of where it comes from
- Anyone can contribute, from anywhere in the world, at any time
- Quality
- Distributed peer reviews
- Transparency of processes
- Improves quality and rapidly adapts code as necessary
Why Red Hat
Next, let’s talk about why Red Hat at all? Below are the main reasons choosing Red Hat makes sense.
- Flexibility
- Start or stop using our subscription model at any time
- Use only what you need
- Transparency
- Eliminates hidden costs
- Using open source code (not proprietary)
- There are no hidden client access limits
- There are no support incident limits
- There are no budgeting for upgrade costs
- Stability
- Financially stable company
- Commercialization of these products to be Enterprise-ready
- Investment
- Reinvestment of 20% of annual revenues back into developing and improving open source software
- Participation in upstream projects
- Integration with upstream projects (e.g. jboss.org, fedora)
- Lead sponsor of cloud and virtualization
- Community enablement through collaboration
Example
There are many examples I can share that expose the real value of open source software. Specifically, as a Consulting Architect, I’m always working with customers on installation and configuration of Red Hat software. At times we hit a problem and with open source software I’m able to immediately evaluate the piece of code that is failing. From that, I can navigate to the Github repository where Red Hat maintains the code and I can find an existing issue or create a new issue and report the problem. After reporting the problem, it’s an issue that is visible not only to Red Hat engineering but also the entire world. Anyone that has been contributing or even those that just use the product can view my concern and respond to my concern immediately. I don’t have to wait for an internal lengthy process to occur and trying to escalate it and loose an entire week or month hoping to get it resolved. Often these resolve fairly quickly and they become included in the next patch of the product.
This is an incredible experience after dealing with proprietary software for most of my career. The benefits are ultimately to the customer but it also has greatly improved my consulting capabilities and turn around time.
