Executive offers peek under the Red Hat

On the Hot Seat

July 03, 2011|By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

(JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON…)

Making money from “open source’’ software - computer programs available free of charge - once seemed crazy. But Red Hat Inc. has prospered by selling service and support for open source programs such as the Linux operating system. Although headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., most Red Hat software is engineered in Westford. Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies, spoke with Hiawatha Bray of the Globe staff about how his company brought open source into the mainstream.

How long has Red Hat been in Massachusetts, and why did you come?

I was the first Massachusetts employee - early 2001. At the time we were a completely retail, boxed product. We decided that there was a need to bring Linux to the [business] enterprise, to make Linux enterprise-class. I did a job fair up here. I had 1,500 people show up, 400 of which had some kind of kernel expertise. I did job fairs in other parts of the country, and I would get one or two.

Did you also tap the local universities for software talent?

The universities were one of the first to move to Linux. Linux was great as a teaching tool because you could see the source code. We hire engineers, and they’re 22, and they’ve been on Linux for 10 years.

The older guys learned from the younger guys on how to do open source, and communities and collaboration. The younger guys learned from the older guys how to do real hardened software - enterprise-ready, secure, highly available. So we decided, probably six years ago, we were going to move the whole product organization up here.

I also have an operation in Silicon Valley. They’re big in social networking, the Googles, that kind of thing. What Massachusetts was always good at is commercial-grade enterprise software. We run the New York Stock Exchange, we run all of the investment banks, we run airlines, we run most of the movie studios.

And since it’s open source, your customers can add improvements to the software, right?

Even movie studios get to contribute what they think is important, and the banks hire kernel engineers and they get to contribute. Open source is really a way to move innovation much more quickly. We’ve been doing this for 10 years. I would say the first five years was building the base. After that, it just took off. If you talk to the analysts, they’ll tell you there’s two commercial operating systems - Linux and Windows. And that’s it.

You know about the decline of Novell Inc., which was supposed to be your primary competitor in Linux software. What went wrong there?

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