OSBC: What Red Hat, Microsoft, CBS Do for Open Source

eWeek: Red Hat: More Customer Involvement with Community
Needed

“Red Hat hasn’t done a good enough job of promoting its position
as the leading Linux vendor, and also needs to do a better job of
getting its customers involved with the community, Jim Whitehurst,
Red Hat CEO and president, told attendees at the opening keynote at
the Open Source Business Conference here March 25.

“‘Our customers expect a lot more from us than we are currently
delivering,’ Whitehurst said. ‘While we deliver the value of the
community model to enterprises, we do a lousy job of getting those
enterprises involved with the community…'”

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The Open Road: OSBC Report: CBS Interactive, Open Source, and
Innovation

“I’ve known Steve Pearson for a year or two, and have always
been blown away by how aggressive his company, CBS Interactive, has
been with adopting open source. MySQL, Linux, Spring, Lucene, etc.
etc. The list of open-source projects that CBS Interactive deploys
is long.

“Why? Why does CBS Interactive use open source…?”

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Story

The Open Road: OSBC Report: Microsoft Attempts to Cross the
Chasm to Open Source

“Tonight Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, delivered
the ‘footnote’ address at the Open Source Business Conference 2008.
I asked Brad to speak because I figured it was the shortest path to
getting clarity from Microsoft vis-a-vis open source and the
nettlesome legal issues that have plagued Microsoft’s relationship
with open source.

“Brad spoke for 30 minutes, and then participated in a follow-up
panel with an A-list group from the open-source community,
including Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), James Bottomley (CTO,
SteelEye and Linux kernel maintainer), Andrew Updegrove (standards
lawyer extraordinaire), and Stephen O’Grady (Redmonk
co-founder)…”

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Story

eWeek: What Can Open Source Learn from Microsoft?

“But, on a more serious note, Zemlin stressed that while Windows
and Linux competed, Microsoft had become the de facto standard over
time, while the Linux Foundation supported open standards.

“Microsoft also did several things well, including providing
some degree of consistency for its platform, while the Linux
community was still defining what the common standards were across
projects and ‘we could be doing a better job of that,’ Zemlin
said…”

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