Q&A: BMC's William Hurley Talks Up Open Source

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"So how does an open-source activist like you end up as the chief architect of open-source strategy at a traditional company like BMC Software? What they were looking for was an open-source leader who could say, 'Here's how you take a company that for 27 years has done proprietary software and integrate open source into their business model in every way, shape and form.' This isn't about trying to jump onto the open-source marketing bandwagon. It's about directly interacting with customers, in how you can apply open source in leveraging that to building better products. I'm a guy who likes a challenge and even with the support of the management team that I do have here, you're still talking about a very large company, a pretty big ship. They don't turn on a dime so this is a pretty big commitment by both sides. The company has been working with open source for a number of years, they just haven't been bragging about it. There's a huge difference in being a leader of a community and being a member of a community. And BMC is a member of our community. We're the voice of many. BMC doesn't want to have an open-source community where... there's a dictatorship. That's not a community..."

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