Red Hat CEO Publishes Open Source Management Memoir 49
ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization, a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also filled with information about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done," he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.
Paging Mark Shuttleworth (Score:3)
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yeah? I thought the latest trend was hating on Red Hat. Now we hate Ubuntu again?
Oh boy! Being a Slashdot user is never boring.
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Be wary of corporations in general, because they will put profits ahead of anything.
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Canonical is one of the best "netizens". Compare with Amazon, Google, Apple, et cetera.
They get criticized because Red Hat is better. But Red Hat is pretty much the only corporation that's a better netizen than Canonical, IMO.
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Just another arrogant CEO (Score:2, Interesting)
patting himself on the back.
Seems like he took over just before Red Hat started to suck.
For the last few years, Red Hat has been making a lot of peculiar decisions to replace standard Linux components, with inferior Red Hat components. Now we have systemd, and an all out war against POSIX, and all things standard UNIX/Linux in favor of Red Hat's propriety solutions.
I am surprised that so few people see the writing on the wall.
Re:Just another arrogant CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah.
Funny thing about computers. They change.
My first Redhat install was on a 486 and the linux world at the time was throwing an absolute shit-fit over the cataclysmic changes in kernel 2.0. Redhat was the devil for embracing it and it was going to be the end of Linux, Redhat, and everything opensource.
That was in 96, and here we have people spewing the same bullshit. It's been almost 20 years. Linux has eclipsed /every/ commercial Unix and Redhat is one of the most important OS vendors in the world. Period.
You're wrong.
Linux is moving on.
Please, for once in your life:
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
Re: Just another arrogant CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
You missed an important point of the guy you replied to. Debian *did* eventually adopt the 2.0 kernel (and all subsequent versions). Did Debian's adoption of the "devilish" 2.0 kernel cause FreeBSD (or whatever your favorite alternative is) to take off?
How about the adoption of PulseAudio? Maybe I missed the memo and there's some other desktop distro out there that didn't adopt PulseAudio that has millions of users, but last I checked, Ubuntu is still the most popular desktop distro by a wide margin, despite an enormous backlash against PulseAudio. Even the second, third and fourth-place distros -- Fedora, OpenSUSE and Arch, in no particular order -- all ship PulseAudio by default, and have many core desktop packages that explicitly depend on PulseAudio components.
It's the same story over and over again:
1. Red Hat introduces some new technology or disruptive change.
2. A minority of the people actively embrace it; the vast majority accept it somewhat reluctantly and go with the flow; and an even smaller minority vocally proclaim from the top of the mountains that any change that requires them to learn new console commands is simply unacceptable because what they have is working just fine for them, thanks.
3. As the software stabilizes and comes to incorporate exhaustively every possible feature and use case of whatever it is designed to replace or obsolete, the people who were reluctant but open-minded become converts who embrace and actively appreciate the new solution.
4. The aforementioned vocal minority of opponents continue to wail away tirelessly and threaten to move to another platform, while quietly adopting and learning the new platform because whatever they tried to move to wasn't good enough for their needs.
If this were *false*, then the installed base of distros like Debian and RHEL and OpenSUSE would look extremely different in 2015 compared to other UNIXes and other distros. However, the leadership of Debian/RHEL/Ubuntu/(Open)SUSE continues to be evident in all the numbers, so the people who seem to perceive some kind of a groundswell of shifting users are just projecting their own preferences onto a group of people who aren't actually doing the same thing they're doing.
And the "actual" so-called FreeBSD adopters will probably return to GNU/Linux within a year or two, anyway. Bet on it.
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This is all off topic and the poster you replied to wasn't correct, however...
A minority of the people actively embrace it; the vast majority accept it somewhat reluctantly and go with the flow; and an even smaller minority
The simple fact is no one has data here. Magically, whoever is bitching and moaning about the other side calls out the other side as the smaller vocal minority. Convenient.
systemd is a different beast than other decisions. RedHat historically caught flak (justifiably) for releasing distributions incorporating pre-release upstream builds in fundamental places. No one argued that the components were going to be the wrong directi
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How about the adoption of PulseAudio?
How about it? Literally the only thing of note I can think of which requires it is Skype.
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There's a surprise - you don't consider anything worthwhile unless it's a closed source piece of shit. Some standard.
No, I don't consider it worthy of note unless a lot of people give a shit.
Oh - right, you have a Windows phone (because it's closed source which is better) and it doesn't have pulseaudio - so other than Skype, nothing of importance uses pulseaudio.
I have a Titan running SOKP.
Re: Just another arrogant CEO (Score:4, Informative)
RedHat has contributed a lot of very cool things to Linux. They have acquired software and opensourced it (e.g. Sistina, Qumranet, Sun/iPlanet LDAP server). They work not only to make a good distro, but also try to solve the bigger problems. For example, they have put together an awesome set of tools that brings Active Directory-like functions to Linux (easy to deploy Kerberos, LDAP, certificate server). They are working on OpenLMI which provides Linux with WBEM management functions. Their Atomic host project is also very interesting. Again, all opensource.
As far as systemd goes. So far I like it. It hasn't burned me at all. Quite the opposite, it has made it easier to write init scripts for our in-house software.
Oh, and BTW, you did hear that the FreeBSD is considering replacing their init system, right? Maybe even something like systemd or launchd (see http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/jordan-hubbard-free-bsd-the-next-10-years [slideshare.net]
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I can't really respect him. I was working at Red Hat. In fact, I was hired the same day he signed on. I met him and thought he was a decent enough guy.
When I got hired it was a dream come true. "I'm getting paid to be on the front line of the Linux revolution? This is amazing."
3 years later, after I sacrificed a lot to the company(40 weeks of travel a year away from friends and family), he approved shutting down my entire department and outsourced us all to an offshore company. We were a profitable division
Re:Just another arrogant CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear mentally challenged individual. It has apparently not come to your attention, but systemd is used by almost every major Linux distribution on the planet. Isn't it strange that all these companies made that same peculiar decision. Clearly they didn't consult you or they would have known that systemd is a Red Hat product!
Tell us more about this war going on in your head!
Yes, Red Hats proprietary Open Source solutions! Congratulations, you just announced to the world that you have been reading Slashdot for more than a decade (See his SlashID Number for those following along) and still don't know the frigging difference between proprietary and FOSS. Bravo. I don't think I could come up with something that phenomenally stupid to say if I spent weeks at it!
Don't plan to read it... (Score:3)
Let's see, he came from running Delta Airlines to run RH. Then, back in December, at a RH dog-and-pony here at work, we watched a 20 min video as part of the many-hour presentation. I was amazed at how he could fill the entire 20 minutes with *nothing* but management buzzwords, and say pretty much nothing else at all.
mark
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Honestly, I'm surprised you're surprised. Because with a 4-digit id I'm sure you've heard way too many CEOs speak.
I remember dreading the quarterly bullshit call with the CEO where he'd do exactly what you described.
It wasn't uncommon to pass out buzzword bingo sheets to the developers before the call ... because it usually took realize the extent to which the rest of the
CEO cheerleading book (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things that bothers me about books like this is how they become primary reference material for MBAs and managers. I've lost count of how many times managers have referenced "Good to Great" or Jack Welch's book to implement very questionable policies. Some guy waxing poetic on what a wonderful job he's done is a lot different from a rigorous study.
One real world example about anecdotal evidence shaping global HR policy is the Google "open floor plan" office trend. Our company is moving from semi-private cubes and offices to a hideous Google-style design. This is for a professional services company where most people require quiet, and are taking phone calls and working on individual/small group projects, not for a software startup. We and countless other companies are doing this simply because Google does it, and has published many articles on how wonderful it is. Evidence is coming out against this (increased sick time, loss of concentration, people hating their co-workers more, etc.) but damnit, if it works for Google it must be right.
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most people require quiet
Use headphones. Personally I prefer open-space to the cubicle farm. Cubicles are the bastard child of open space and offices with the worst qualities of both.
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Cubicles are the bastard child of open space and offices with the worst qualities of both.
Which would make cubicles preferable to open space because open space has no good qualities. Cubicles would then get at least some of the good qualities of offices.
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Open space has lots of good qualities. It facilities communication between workers. The open spaces are usually more well lit with natural light. Plus they are easier to rearrange as the company grows.
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Use headphones.
Replacing noise with noise is not quiet.
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Yes, and similarly if you require darkness turn on a light! (please tell me English is your sixth language)
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Noise-blocking headphones and/or listening to white noise can provide an experience closer to quiet than a cubicle.
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Exactly.
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In re: open floor plans, I think that they are awful. Besides the fact that I personally do not thrive in that type of environment, it taught me bad habits. I try to be very considerate of other people's workspace and recognize the fact that they should not be arbitrarily disturbed. If others are like me, I know that a disruption at the wrong moment can cost mental context and lost time. However, from the open office plan I "learned" that I could distract any one at any time for absolutely the smallest reas
I'm reading this, and I'm about halfway through. (Score:1)
I haven't come across anything that seems like bad advice, yet. The two biggest points seem to be:
- good ideas come from anywhere, and you should build your organization in a way that allows those ideas to surface
- Similarly, "leaders" and "leadership" should be emergent phenomena, and not handed down from on high by some predefined organization structure.
Red Hat is a good company (Score:1)