After a full day of the Opensource.com Community Moderator annual meeting, the last item on the agenda came up, with only the words “Special Guest: TBA”. As the project lead and community manager for Opensource.com, Jason Hibbets stood up and explained, “Because this guest might not be able to attend, I didn’t want to say who it was in advance. A few months ago I asked him when he would be available, he gave me two time slots, and I chose one. Today is the only day in these three weeks that Jim can come.” (Translator’s note: Jim refers to Jim Whitehurst mentioned below, the President and CEO of Red Hat)
This statement caused a stir among the moderators, who had come from all over the world to attend the All Things Open Conference. The moderators moved their chairs forward and listened carefully.
“He will first give a half-hour speech, then answer a few questions,” Jason said.
The door to the meeting room was open, as if waiting for this important person to appear. At this time, a tall man came to the only empty seat in front of the meeting room.
“Hello everyone!” the guy said. He wasn’t wearing a suit, just a shirt and casual pants.
At this time, the second tallest person in the room, Jeff Mackanic, senior director of Red Hat’s Global Awareness department, told him that most community moderators were present today, and then asked everyone to start making brief self-introductions.
“My name is Jen Wike Huger, I’m in charge of content management for Opensource.com, nice to meet you all.”
“My name is Nicole. I’m the vice president of ByWater Solutions, we’re doing free open source libraries. I travel around and teach people how to use software.”
“My name is Robin, I’ve been involved in the moderator program since 2013. I do some work at OSDC, and my job is to maintain the website for the City of the Hague.”
“My name is Marcus Hanwell, from England, working at Kitware. At the same time, I’m the technical director of FOSS science software, collaborating with national laboratories on Titan Z and GPU programming. I mainly use Gentoo and KDE. Finally, I’m excited to be involved in FOSS and open source science.”
“My name is Phil Shapiro, I’m the administrator of 28 Linux workstations in a small library in Washington. I regard all of you as my colleagues. I’m very happy to exchange ideas, share, and contribute. I mainly focus on the relationship between FOSS and pride, and how FOSS enhances pride.”
“My name is Joshua Holm. I spend most of my time focusing on system updates and helping people find jobs online.”
“My name is Mel Chernoff, I work at Red Hat, and together with Jason Hibbets and Mark Bohannon, I mainly focus on government channels.”
“My name is Scott Nesbitt, I’ve written a lot of things and have been using FOSS for a long time. I’m an ordinary person, not a system administrator, not a programmer, just want to work more efficiently. I help people use FOSS in business and life.”
“My name is Luis Ibanez, I just joined Google. I’m interested in DIY and FOSS.”
“My name is Remy DeCausemaker, I’m a Resident Hackademic at the RIT MAGIC Center and a part-time professor in the Interactive Games and Media Department. I’ve been writing for Opensource.com for nearly four years.”
“You teach in the new FOSS Minor?”, Jim said, “That’s cool!”
“My name is Jason Baker. I’m a cloud expert at Red Hat, mainly working on OpenStack.”
“My name is Mark Bohannan, I’m a member of Red Hat’s Global Open Agreements, working outside Washington. Like Mel, I spend a lot of time writing and finding collaborators from legal and government departments. I made a good pamphlet to discuss the positive changes happening in government.”
“My name is Jason Hibbets, I organized this discussion.”
There was a burst of laughter in the room.
“I also organized this discussion, so to speak,” the red-haired guy with a bright smile said. The laughter continued for a while and gradually subsided.
I was on his left, occasionally looking up from my notes, and I noticed that the impressive person behind the faint smile was Jim Whitehurst, the CEO who has led Red Hat since January 2008.
“I have the best job in the world,” Whitehurst began his speech, leaning back slightly with his legs crossed and hands behind his head. “When I started leading Red Hat, I traveled around the world to see the situation. In these seven years, the most wonderful thing that has happened to FOSS and extensive open source innovation is that open source has broken free from its boundaries. I now believe that information technology is in the position where FOSS was before. We can foresee FOSS moving from being a substitute to an innovation driver. Our users also see this. They use FOSS not because it’s cheap, but because it can bring controllable and innovative solutions. This is also a global phenomenon. For example, I was just in India, and I found that users there embrace open source for two reasons: one is innovation, and the other is that the market there is somewhat special, requiring complete control.”
“The Bombay Stock Exchange wants to get the source code and control it, which was unheard of in the securities trading field five years ago. At that time, FOSS was reinventing the wheel. Today, it seems that almost everything in big data appears in the FOSS field. Almost all new frameworks, languages, and methodologies, including mobile communications (though not including devices), first happen in the open source world.”
“This is because the number of users has reached a considerable scale. This is not just the case for Red Hat, but also for Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They want to solve their own problems in an open source way. Forget about licenses, open source is much more than that. We’ve built a vehicle, a set of rules, such as Hadoop, Cassandra and other tools. In fact, open source drives innovation. For example, Hadoop was a solution when vendors realized the problems brought by scale. They actually had enough funds and resources to solve their own problems. Open source is the default technical solution in many fields. This is even more so in a world that focuses more on content, such as 3D printing and other physical products that use information content.”
“Open sourcing source code is indeed cool, but open source should not be limited to this. Open source still has room to play in different fields of various industries. We need to ask ourselves: ‘What can open source bring to education, government, law? What about others? How can other fields learn from us?’”
“There’s also the issue of content. Content is free now, and of course we can invest in more free content, but we also need content around business models. This is what we should pay more attention to. If you believe open innovation is better, then we need more business models.”
“Education worries me because it focuses more on ‘content’ than ‘community’. For example, wherever I go, university presidents will say, ‘Wait, is education going to be free?!’ For downstream, FOSS being free is great, but don’t forget that upstream is powerful. Free courses are great, but we also need communities to continuously iterate and improve. This is what many people are doing, and Opensource.com is a community that provides communication. The question is not ‘how do we control content’ or ‘how to create and distribute content’, but to ensure that it is constantly being improved and can provide valuable references to other fields.”
“The potential to change the world is endless, and we have made great progress.” Six years ago, we were obsessed with making declarations, and we said ‘we are leaders’. We used the wrong word because it potentially implies control. Active participants also couldn’t understand well… Máirín Duffy proposed the word catalyst. Then we formed Red Hat, constantly promoting action and guiding direction.”
“Opensource.com is also a catalyst for other fields, and this is its original purpose, I hope you also think so. The quality of content then compared to now is incredible. You can see it improving every quarter. Thank you for your time! Thank you for being catalysts! This is an opportunity to make the world a better place. I want to hear your thoughts.”
I glanced at the table and found tears in several people’s eyes.
Then Whitehurst revisited the open education topic of the conference. “Looking at the extreme, if you have an open course on Ulysses. Here you can collaborate with a group of people to experience the class. This is just like code blocks: everyone works together, and the code improves over time.”
At this point, I have something to say. When talking about the differences between FOSS and academic communities, words like “foundation” and “possible incompatibility” came up.
Remy: “Backward brings death. If you make a mistake in a paper or published code, it can have very serious consequences. Schools have always been places to avoid failure and seek correct answers. Copying means plagiarism. Wheels are dogmatically invented over and over again. FOSS allows you to fail quickly, but in academia, you can only bring invalid results.”
Nicole: “There are too many self-centered people in academia, you need a release manager.”
Marcus: “In order to collaborate, you must show what you don’t understand, which happens behind the scenes. The reward model is everything you trust, and we need to change it. Publish as much as possible, we will release at the end, but hope to release efforts as early as possible.”
Luis: “Teamwork and sharing should be prioritized, and Red Hat can emphasize this more to them.”
Jim: “Are there any other companies playing an active role in this?”
Phil Shapiro: “I’m interested in the tipping point of FOSS. The Fed not switching to LibreOffice drives me crazy. We don’t spend tax money on software, and we shouldn’t waste tax money on word processing software or Microsoft Office.”
Jim: “We often advocate for this. Can we do more? That’s the question. First, we’ve made progress where our products are involved. We have a solid franchise in government. We spend more on average than private companies. Banking and telecommunications are next to government. We do better in Europe, where I think there are lower taxes. The next generation of computing is like ‘The Terminator’, we’ve made progress everywhere, but we still need a sense of urgency.”
Suddenly, the door opened. Jim turned and nodded to his executive assistant standing at the door. He was going to the next meeting. He straightened his legs, stood and leaned forward slightly. Then, he thanked everyone again for their work and dedication, smiled, and walked out the door… leaving us with more inspiration.
Reprinted with permission: Developer Relations »
