Open Source a $1 Billion Business, But Just Beginning

Speaking at the opening of Red Hat Summit 2012 to a gathering of more than 3,000 people, Whitehurst began by looking backward, almost to the dawn of human history, to the invention of agriculture as the first industry as a collective endeavor by human beings to extract value from the land. From that time until the birth of the industrial revolution, he says, humans primarily generated value directly from a single physical asset: land. Around 1750 the industrial revolution began to alter that model as the machines humans created to extract value from the land became the primary source of value.