CIO:
Open source has entered the mainstream, says Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, pointing to the billion dollars in revenue it reported in the last fiscal year—a feat only a few software companies (open source or proprietary) have managed. But while open source may have crossed the Rubicon, the battle for the future is just beginning, he says.
Speaking at the opening of Red Hat Summit 2012 to a gathering of more than 3,000 people, Whitehurst began by looking backward, almost to the dawn of human history, to the invention of agriculture as the first industry as a collective endeavor by human beings to extract value from the land. From that time until the birth of the industrial revolution, he says, humans primarily generated value directly from a single physical asset: land. Around 1750 the industrial revolution began to alter that model as the machines humans created to extract value from the land became the primary source of value.