LinuxWorld Australia: The Rewards of Open Source

“Several weeks ago, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention,
Michael Tiemann–formerly Red Hat’s CTO and now vice president of
open source affairs–spoke about the role of Fedora, Red Hat’s free
Linux distribution. To refute the claim that Fedora represents a
fork of its core product, Tiemann appealed to a notion that is best
summed up in a phrase popularized by Tim O’Reilly: ‘the
architecture of participation.’

“To meet the needs of the enterprise customers who pay Red Hat’s
bills, Tiemann said, it was necessary to slow the release cycle and
create ‘a massively long release runway on which Oracle, and
Veritas, and BEA, and all these other guys could actually land.’
But the solution to one business problem created another. It
disenfranchised the people in the open source community whose
energy and ideas created Linux and continue to drive its
evolution…”

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