Developing a software giant on the ideals of open-source

Jim Whitehurst runs Red Hat on principles of meritocracy, openness and transparency

IF MANAGING developers is, as the saying goes, like herding cats, what can it be like running the world’s largest open-source company, Red Hat?

Chief executive Jim Whitehurst, former chief operations officer of Delta Airlines, has taken on the role of principal herder with a gusto that has earned him much respect within the open-source community.

Open-source development is software development by a community – typically a global, highly opinionated community – that freely works on application code. A key condition is that applications are freely available to anyone.

Such an approach has led most famously to Linux, the hugely popular operating system that can be obtained in many different “flavours” – different versions offered by different development groups and companies. Red Hat’s is easily the best known, and the company has a business model based on offering support and services around its version of Linux.

Whitehurst, who was in Dublin this week for a Red Hat conference at the Convention Centre, says open-source values permeate not only code development but also company management at Red Hat. But running a company that blends open-source ideals and commercial drive has no script.

“I think Red Hat is on the bleeding edge of a next-generation management model. Red Hat is a company built on a set of open-source principles, such as transparency, openness and meritocracy. Whereas most airlines are very military in culture: if the person in charge says do something, people go do it,” he says. “At Red Hat I might say, ‘I think we need to do this’, and people will say ‘What do you mean?’ Or I might find out that nothing happened, and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, well we didn’t agree.’”

He laughs. “In a meritocracy, a title conveys some kind of principles but a title doesn’t make you right.”

In such an environment, he says, leadership is “really about building momentum and convincing people”, leading through earned respect. “We lead via influence. We don’t lead via fiat.”

Whitehurst was seen as a surprise appointment to Red Hat. At Delta, he was not overly focused on IT, although he has a degree in computer science, had “screwed around with Linux for years”, and had Fedora, Red Hat’s desktop version of Linux, on his PC. But his performance has earned respect, not least from shareholders.

When he took on the chief executive role three years ago, Red Hat was a $500-million-a-year company. Analysts such as Piper Jaffray now predict it is likely to hit the significant milestone of $1 billion this quarter.

“There’s been a lot of growth in the last few years, because we’ve crossed over to the mainstream,” Whitehurst says. “Linux is used by retailers, airlines, industrial companies. And we’re probably 80 per cent of paid Linux. Almost anything you do online, you’re using Linux; and, more often than not, it’s our Linux.”

There is still a lot of free Linux available elsewhere, he acknowledges, but that’s fine. “It seeds the market for us” when companies want support and services.

Whitehurst came into Red Hat publicly stating he thought the company could grow to be a $5 billion enterprise. Where will such aggressive growth come from?

“Clouds run Linux,” he says. He believes that will massively increase demand for Linux in data centres and elsewhere. Along with that demand will come the need for management and services, Red Hat’s core business.

A growing concern for the company is the threat of proprietary control in cloud services and virtualisation. As more companies offer “private” clouds – where anyone from an individual to a corporation can take space – Red Hat would like to see applications in one cloud transferable to another without needing to be rewritten.

“We’re adamant about the need to standardise, so that developers can write once and deploy where they want,” he says.

On the virtualisation side, Whitehurst is concerned that virtualisation giant VMware is attempting to “create another Microsoft” and have the ability to determine what features can be used in applications and services. Virtualisation is the growing push in corporate computing to enable numerous “virtual” operating systems to run at the same time on a single computer, managed by a program called a hypervisor.

Until now, hypervisors from companies such as VMware sat on top of the main operating system on a computer, and the virtual operating systems managed by the hypervisor could talk directly to the core operating system and hence the hardware, meaning third parties could add new features as they wished.

Now, there is a drive to have only the hypervisor communicate directly to the underlying operating system, meaning features cannot be enabled unless the hypervisor permits them.

Whitehurst argues the need for an open-source hypervisor alternative, which Red Hat offers, but take-up in the market has been slow. The recent formation of a new Open Virtualisation Alliance that includes Hewlett-Packard and IBM as well as Red Hat is an indication the big companies that create software management tools are concerned they could be beholden to VMware and others in future, he says.

“Bluntly, I think no one believes in having one vendor have that much control over the next generation of computing,” he says.

As for some older rivalries, Microsoft was the Goliath to Red Hat’s David back in the early days of Linux. Many would argue Linux’s rapid growth hammered Microsoft. These days, with Microsoft developing its own open-source initiatives, do they get along?

Whitehurst laughs. “Get along is a strong word, but we’re not actively at war. First off, we don’t compete with Microsoft that much. Our biggest marketplace has been replacing Unix, not Windows.”

And Red Hat has no interest in getting into the personal desktop business, he says, an area Microsoft dominates.

As for Red Hat’s relationship with Oracle, things seem a bit more testy. In a surprise move a few years ago, Oracle turned the tables on its one-time partner and issued a Red Hat Linux clone, with Oracle support and services.

“At an engineering level, we talk; at an executive level, we try, and it’s cordial – or maybe that’s a bit strong; it’s civil.”

Oracle engineers, acknowledges Whitehurst, contribute back constantly to the “kernel” – Linux’s core code – and are good open-source community citizens. “But we have a fundamental difference in how we view Linux.”

What does he see as his biggest challenge? “I do spend a lot of time thinking about how we scale. Innovation is non-linear.” And that goes back to management, he says – the constant challenge, and benefit, of herding the cats in an open-source organisation.

“CEOs feel they don’t get enough innovation out of their organisation, but that’s because [of] the way the organisations are structured. Traditional structures don’t work to get the best out of people. There’s a lot that Red Hat can teach on how innovation happens in a meritocracy.”