Open Source Solutions

The OSBC 2008 started with a Keynote from Matt Asay. Here are some of my "takeaways"

1. There has been a large uptick in participation at this year's OSBC from members of IT [customer-side]
2. 2B$ invested in OSS & >2B$ given back through M&A activity in the past year
3. Some stats
   • 71% of enterprises using OSS are expanding their use of OSS
   • 65% say use of OSS sparked innovation
   • 85% say 0SS hiqher quality
4. Matt shows off his video editing & mashup skills. The result defies my ability to describe, you'll just have to wait for the YouTube download ;-)

The next Keynote was from Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO of Red Hat. He started with a marketing multimedia that gave some interesting facts:

• 3000+ certified applications are available
• Red Hat linux is certified on thousands of hardware systems

Red Hat is seen as one of the largest and most successful open source vendor, and it will be stepping up to its role as an OSS leader.

The career path at Red Hat starts in Services with promotion to Development. This reminds me of my time in aerospace, where a "proper" career path was to start in QA/Test, move to development and then "retire" back into a QA role.

Jim has never seen a company as focused on the customer as is Red Hat.

Jim went over some points that fall under Red Hat's evolving Business Model.

1. good for customers as increase value every day through iterative innovation with stability through enterprise edition
2. Red Hat will do a better job of involving large enterprise customers in the community
3. Red Hat's goal is to become the defining technology company for 21st century through its work with the community

I had to skip the next keynote to prepare for my first scheduled meeting of the day.