As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst declared at this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, open source and its children – including cloud computing – are laying waste to the economics of how traditional enterprises do business, forcing them to gravitate to information to compete. Red Hat’s role in this tectonic shift? Arms dealer.
Or machine tool manufacturer. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Cloud computing is all the rage these days, but it’s really a natural consequence of the open-source trend that started decades ago. Cloud computing is essentially impossible in any major way without open-source software at its heart, a point Google has stressed for years. The economics just don’t work without high-quality free software with minimal licensing friction.