Friday Five — September 16, 2016

Red Hat is now accepting nominations for the 2017 Red Hat Innovation Awards. Since 2007, the Red Hat Innovation Awards have recognized Red Hat's global customers and partners for the transformative projects and outstanding results they have experienced with Red Hat's open source solutions. Organizations can submit nominations in five categories. Category winners will be selected based on the uniqueness, complexity, and magnitude of their Red Hat implementations. Submissions will be accepted until Nov. 9, 2016, and will be evaluated by a panel of business and open source technology experts. One winner will be chosen in each category. From those winners, the 2017 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting, and will be announced during an awards ceremony at the 2017 Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Everything, it would seem, is open to open source. ... [T]he answer to "Why open source?" is always "Because developers." Hence, in a world increasingly dependent on developers, enterprises need to get serious about open source... In discussing why Pixar was open sourcing its Universal Scene Description (USD) technology, which aids filmmakers to work with 3D scene data, Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, declared: "We believe that being open with our technology and sharing it with our peers in the industry is how we can best continue to drive innovation." Sure, but drive innovation for whom? After all, this technology is core to Pixar's technology strategy and, hence, its business. Why would the company gift its secret sauce to competitors? ... Because they were able to rally developers to their standard, freeing up resources to innovate in other areas. ... Even if the de facto standardization effort fails, Pixar wins, because it sends a signal to developer recruits and existing employees that it's a great place for them to build code. Developers don't want their best work hidden behind a proprietary license. They want to work with the best people employed by their organization and with those outside their firewall.

Originally built as an execution engine, Ansible began by allowing Linux and Unix admins to remotely run arbitrary commands on one or more machines, but it has since evolved into a complete solution for automating and managing your entire IT infrastructure. With version 2.0, Ansible added more than 200 modules to improve and expand support for Amazon Web Services, CloudStack, OpenStack, VMware, Windows, and network infrastructure, among other targets. ... To summarize some of its main advantages: Ansible is easy to set up and use. Ansible comes with clear documentation and clean code, so it's easy for both newbies and advanced developers to quickly learn and use the tool. Ansible Tower is a web UI dashboard that lets you monitor and manage the entire infrastructure from a central location. Ansible combines push with workflow and orchestration capabilities to allow both simple and flexible automation. ... Ansible has a well-deserved reputation as straightforward and easy to learn. ... [Ansible] is currently best suited for organizations that require simple and quick automation of smaller IT environments. These organizations could hardly find an easier CM and automation solution to get started with.

There are several reasons why your software project is not a product. ... The goals of a project are fundamentally different from a product. A project is not a place to put too many constraints. Your project is designed to a be a hub of innovation, and you never know where or when the ideas that drive your future revenue will strike. ... Not only is your project where the innovation happens, and you can't accurately predict the time and place of that innovation, it's also the place where people will use your software for off-label purposes. Maybe their use case didn't quite fit your mental models, or perhaps they saw a unique dimension for your software that you never considered. This is why you create an open source community and project space: to make a safe place for innovation to happen. Constraining that space with product requirements is precisely how one kills a community or prevents it from ever really launching. Where projects are about innovation and expanding horizons, products are specifically designed to scope out the lines of where, exactly, a customer use case is supported or not. You don't want your product vision to expand like our universe, infinitely in all directions. You need to constrain it if you ever hope to be able to support your customers and scale out your operations. This means reducing your risk, as well as that of your customers, even if it means saying no to developing new features for the time being.

Herzog Technologies, a leader in the railroad signal and communications industry, has launched a cloud-based positive train control (PTC) solution using Red Hat technologies. The enterprise-grade foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the backend to the complex IoT system required for the intelligence and dynamism expected of PTC, while Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite help Herzog with systems management and compliance. Combined, Red Hat's powerful open source technologies are helping Herzog provide railroads with the ability to more quickly adopt PTC technology, helping to enable safer and more efficient rail transportation.