Friday Five — March 16, 2018

Since our earliest days, Red Hat has had a company culture rooted in open source principles, which creates part of our strategic competitive advantage. Yet the choice to be open is not always an easy one to make, let alone explain. As we approached our 25 year anniversary, we decided to set out on a journey to articulate a simple answer to some complex questions: Why does Red Hat exist? Why do we work in the unique ways that we do? What deeply-held belief has long guided our decisions and should do so for the coming decades, as well?

Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, has revealed at Mobile World Congress 2018 that why telecom operators are looking for open source software platforms. OpenStack is a main technology for network functions virtualization (NFV), designed to provide telcos with better reliability and lower latency. Red Hat shared details why Japan's NTT Docomo and ARSAT, a government-owned telco in Argentina, are using Red Hat, as well as Elisa, which provides SON solution to enable telecom operators to optimize network. Elisa has collaborated with Red Hat to be more agile in developing, managing and launching Elisa SON, a solution to generate increased network efficiency, as well as improved service quality and customer experience.

Monday night on Mad Money, Cramer called the Raleigh-based Linux software and cloud services giant an "excellent" buying opportunity based on its recent performance. Wall Street investors must like what they see in the Hatters. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) stock is up 89 percent year-over-year. Cramer noted: "The growth has really taken off since they made this move [to help customers build private clouds]."

Kavit Majithia is joined in the studio at Mobile World Congress 2018 by Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. Discussion topics included Red Hat's $250 million acquisition of CoreOS and the challenges facing the open-source software market.

Like every year, legal issues were a hot topic in the open source world in 2017. While we're deep into the first quarter of the year, it's still worthwhile to look back at the top legal news in open source last year. Take a look at some of the most important legal cases from the past year, including GitHub's revision of their Terms of Service.