Friday Five — July 8, 2016

"Part of our secret sauce is that we are open and we're passionate about it. That does several things. First, it allows us to attract the best open-source talent. People want to come to Red Hat because they know everything we do is open. We release all of our code. Period. There's nothing proprietary. I think that is meaningful to a lot of open-source developers so they want to be at Red Hat. Second, it gives us a very crisp clear message in the market. We're not saying open-source is good here, but then we go and do something else. We believe it's the best way to develop software. Then we give it away. It's free. It's up to us to figure out how to add value beyond the functionality of the software because it's free. And since it's fully open source, there is no vendor lock in... We put community first. We have an upstream first policy. Everything we do goes upstream and that's just a part of who we are and what we do. We always say there's not a conflict between community and upstream because the communities are in enterprise, because we're all in."

This week's Red Hat Summit tech conference in San Francisco closed out its keynote session with a bang–an on-stage wedding, officiated by Red Hat tech EVP Paul Cormier, with CEO Jim Whitehurst acting as ring bearer. It was not immediately clear who the lucky bride or groom are, or why they chose to celebrate their nuptials at a conference about open-source software. But it happened. You can watch the whole thing via archived Periscope livestream.

If you want to see the true implications of how open-source is changing the world, you need only look to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. Tom Soderstrom, IT chief technology and innovation officer at JPL, spoke first during the 2016 Red Hat Summit keynote about using tools to address age-old questions. Where could we find life? Did Mars ever house life? Where could we find Earth 2.0, and how do we understand our solar system? These are the questions that JPL is using technology to find answers. Soderstrom contends that in order to find the answers, JPL needs to change how they work by figuring out the key IT disruptors available. He noted that the consumer space is making rapid innovation in technology while the enterprise lags behind at a glacial pace. "Today's toy is tomorrow's tool," Soderstrom asserted. He wants to bring them to the enterprise now... For JPL the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape is considered a disruptor that, as Soderstrom pointed out, is still in the toy stage, with security issues but useful results. He showed the audience current projects involving IoT, the power of the cloud and analytics for security. With a wish for JPL to be more open while living with government regulations, he believes that JPL needs to act like a startup and change from rules to principles. Open source will allow the agency to engage and enable the community to answer the age old-questions through the power of participation.

Jessica McKellar, director of engineering and chief of staff to the vice president of engineering at Dropbox, and Preeti Murthy, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, are the 2016 Women in Open Source Award winners. Both were recognized during the Red Hat Summit. Red Hat launched the Women in Open Source Awards in 2015 to honor women who make important contributions to open source projects and communities, or those making innovative use of open source methodology. Nominations for this year's awards were accepted for two categories: academic (those currently enrolled in a college or university) and community (those working or volunteering on projects related to open source). Finalists were determined based on nomination criteria, with the public voting to determine the winners.

Those looking to ascertain the ubiquitous nature of open source need look no further than the trajectory of .NET, Microsoft's widely-adopted general development platform. In November 2014, Microsoft announced the open sourcing of .NET with .NET Core, a just-in-time (JIT) compiler and runtime for .NET. Then, in November 2015, Red Hat and Microsoft announced a landmark relationship, which established our collaboration with and promised access to .NET on the world's leading enterprise Linux platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, our award-winning container application platform. Today, we're pleased to announce that .NET Core is now not only available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift via certified containers, but is supported by Red Hat and extended via the integrated hybrid support partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat. This makes Red Hat the only commercial Linux distribution to feature full, enterprise-grade support for .NET, opening up platform choice for enterprises seeking to use .NET on a flexible Linux and container-based environments.