Red Hat is in the business of building and giving away this open-source software. At one level, Whitehurst said, cloud is just the standardisation of compute, storage and network. It sounds dull, but it is the foundation for so much more that happens. He compared the current technology standardisation – whether represented through cloud or open source – to the introduction in the 1800s of the auto lathe.
The auto lathe enabled industries to standardise simple things like nuts and bolts, which up until this point were different between manufacturers. That standardisation led to huge businesses like Ford and Caterpillar.