About 20 years ago, I started my own technology consulting company. We mostly did strategic consulting in IT – architecture, strategy, IT effectiveness, projects rescues and Lean Six Sigma consulting. Those sorts of things.
But at the same time I was fascinated with open source – and I’ve mentioned this before. I couldn’t believe that individuals and even companies would collaborate to develop sophisticated software that could run at an enterprise level and that the source code would be freely available for anyone to take and even modify.
It was a new world. But how did you make money in a world like this? That was the question.
One way was support. I remember taking my first and very heavy IBM server up the stairs in my house, hoping I wouldn’t fall over. I remember plugging it in, hoping it wouldn’t draw so much current that the old knob and tube wires would cause a fire. And I remember setting it up and installing – Linux.
Reading books, going online for what was there, phoning and chatting with friends.
The company grew over the years to do more tech stuff in the open source world. But two things remained – the magic was there and the problem of how you balance the open source side of the house with the ability to make money – the mission and the money.
There’s always been that tension in the open source community and occasionally, it causes some, to use my mandatory sci-fi reference – some disturbance in the force.
For those of you who have followed recent events – I’ve interviewed what I would say is one side of the discussion – we’ve had one of the co- founder of CentOS, the founder of Rocky Linux and the head of the AlmaLinux Foundation. My colleague Paul Barker has done a great article as well.
We’ll put links to all of these in the show notes so listeners and readers can get all of the perspectives.
But before we do that, I thought it was really important to get one more point of view.
And today, we have Gunnar Hellekson, General Manager and Vice president of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mike McGrath Vice President of core platforms engineering at Red Hat to bring us their view on what’s been happening.
BONUS CONTENTÂ
Got your attention with that one? Okay, I just wanted to make sure that it was easy for you to find the other interviews I’ve done on this. This is an article with access to my two interviews with Rocky Linux’s Greg Kurtzer and AlmaLInux’s benny Vasquez.
These two interviews are well worth listening to give you not just the full range of opinions, but also some great insights into the open source community.
Hope you enjoy them.