Friday Five — December 22, 2017

Red Hat is predicting it will make $2.911 billion for its fiscal year. Not bad for a company in a world where people can still say with a straight face they don't understand how open source can make money. Hello. Wake-up alert. Nobody gets fired for buying Linux, open source software, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) these days. One noteworthy point in [this quarter's earnings] results, Whitehurst added, is that a great deal of Red Hat's growth is coming because of "our growing number of seven-figure and multi seven-figure transactions." In short, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is becoming increasingly a staple of Enterprise IT.

For many years, Red Hat's cloud infrastructure offering had positioned it as a single product company, as it became the go-to provider for systems based around open source software like Linux. It's now pouncing on many of this year's biggest technology trends, including the Internet of Things and hybrid cloud computing. Ahead of Red Hat's fiscal third quarter earnings this week, TheStreet spoke with Red Hat chief financial office Eric Shander about what's powering the business now, how it's dealing with the cloud wars in Silicon Valley and the rise of big data.

The open organization community at Opensource.com is proud to announce the immediate release of The Open Organization Workbook, the sixth book in the Open Organization book series. The Open Organization Workbook features contributions from more than 30 managers, educators, technologists, consultants, and other experts, who offer concrete and actionable strategies for putting the principles of transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community into practice.

Each year the contributing editors at Virtualization & Cloud Review roundup products they love, from what they rely on every day to the innovative tech products they're excited to see. This year, enterprise IT watcher and analyst Dan Kusnetzky selected us for our framework, which makes it easier for enterprises to monitor, manage and automate their physical, virtual and cloud resources. Our community also gets a shout out from Dan, noting our 3,000 contributors worldwide. They're a testament to our dedicated community, contributing to the project and enabling the monitoring, management and automation of Windows, Linux and more.

Early DevOps discussions often focused on breaking down the wall between developers and operations. The thinking went that, if developers didn't just toss their new applications over to operations and run away, the world of IT would be a better place. That was how operations viewed the state of affairs in any case. There's certainly truth in that stereotype of standard practice. We can probably all agree that open communication lines and mutual understanding are good things. But eliminating unnecessary communications can be a good practice too.