OSBC Underway
May 22, 2007 1 Comment
The OSBC is officially underway. The opening keynote was the always interesting Matthew Szulik. I’m not sure who does the Red Hat short videos, but they are consistently both entertaining and compelling (even if some of the themes are reused quite a bit). Some interesting tidbits from the keynote:
* Open Source no longer needs to be validated
* Open Source has the ability to change IT from a cost to a value
* A long while back, while trying to get VC for Red Hat, someone asked Matt when he was going to “give up on this gimmick”
* In his opinion he feels that Open Source also has a social responsibility component. He gives as an example a research institute that had to ditch a decade of breast cancer research due to data incompatibilities
* He welcomes the competition from the likes of Oracle, and sees it as a management responsibility to compete…and not a technical issue
* He often feels in sales meetings that the crowd is divided – the 40+ crowd dislikes him (not personally, of course) and the 25-ish crowd thinks he’s pretty cool
* We are only at the beginning of the Open Source cycle… and cycles in this industry are the norm
–jeremy
Jeremy's Blog 
I like how Szulik talks about the social responsibilities of open source companies. Red Hat has always been a great member of the open source community, and it’s refreshing to hear it out loud. Between him and (recently) Schwartz, there’s some nice love for OSS in corporate-land. Let’s hope it remains for the long term.