The answer is 42
by Karsten Wade
Keynote at JBoss World yesterday started with Jim Whitehurst, the new Red Hat President and CEO. It was his 42nd day at Red Hat, an auspicious number to many of us. He brought a fresh perspective to the subject of “making money on free software.”
In his opening, Jim went over the basics — a discussion about the community model that Red Hat and JBoss follow, where a single entity manages the two communities, enterprise/business and open source. He started by making an honest statement about what he thought when he started the new job. To paraphrase, “I thought the model with an open source community and an enterprise community was an artificial construct to make it easier to sell free software.”
In his days now at Red Hat, Jim has dived in and discovered how alive, healthy, and essential this model is to the success of everyone involved. The open source community side is healthier than ever, and enterprise and business community members are learning how to be ahead and participate in the future through being part of the open community, while being day-to-day consumers of the stable and supported. This is something developers have known for years, and it was good to have a fresh-from-the-outside person with a business focus reaffirming this.
Following Jim was middleware CTO Sacha Labourey, who picked up the same theme of wrangling the fast moving open source community into the stable enterprise community’s needs. JBoss.org keeps things going the way JBoss has always been run (”It’s free, and it doesn’t suck”), while the enterprise branches are the focus for support, services, and the business relationship. This model is continuing to work well, with the actual numbers of community-based downloads increasing (20 million+) and the overall organization is growing.
Another point Sacha raised was the importance of the newer business unit structure of Red Hat. This may not seem important to developers on the face of it, but Sacha is right: the separate middleware business makes it clear that this community and product line is an important part of the Red Hat future. The middleware group now has the autonomy to work as they need, while still remaining part of the same great product family.
Sacha finished off his portion of the keynotes by bringing several project leads on stage to do actual product demonstrations. This was a nice element to add for a developer conference. It gave these leads another chance to make their voices heard, and it was a good demonstration of how well the products work together. Max Rydahl Andersen showed how easy it is to modify and deploy from within JBoss Developer Studio. Julian Viet demo’d Max’s web page pulled into JBoss Portal. At the end, Mark LIttle came up to show how this fits into the overall SOA. Throughout the demo, the A/V system gave Sacha challenges, but he handled it with aplomb and never lost the audience. After all, what better audience to witness everything going well with the code while the supporting system has fits?