Jim Whitehurst

We interview Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst

It Starts and Ends with Community

Article from ADMIN 35/2016

By Swapnil Bhartiya

Red Hat is known as the king of Linux. The company was founded as AAC Corporation by Bob Young in 1993, two years after Linux was created.

Red Hat is known as the king of Linux. The company was founded as AAC Corporation by Bob Young in 1993, two years after Linux was created. Red Hat has emerged as the most successful open source company, with revenues of more than US$2 billion per year. During his keynote speech at LinuxCon North America, Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, said that the Red Hat and the Linux community work so closely that it's hard to talk about Red Hat without talking about Linux. He also talked about how Red Hat changed its business model from selling t-shirts and coffee mugs to create what many today call the Red Hat business model. ADMIN news editor Swapnil Bhartiya caught up with Whitehurst to talk about Red Hat, Linux, and the challenges beyond.

ADMIN Magazine: Linux is 25 years old. What do you think Linux has achieved in these 25 years. What has it contributed to our society that is beyond software and code?

Jim Whitehurst: Linux has won. UNIX is slowly retreating, and Linux is driving new innovations, in areas like cloud and containers, that will be at the heart of IT for years to come. Linux is running some of the most mission-critical workloads in the world. It has retained its relevance because it's shown a better way of organizing and coordinating effort around building technology. It's helped spur the creation of hundreds of thousands of open source projects that are driving the innovation happening in technology today. An organization like Google would simply not exist without Linux.

AD: Red Hat was founded in 1993, two years after Linux was announced. What was Red Hat back then? What was the business model? What were you chasing? Fast forward to 2016, what's your business model today? (I want to talk about the evolution of Red Hat in these 23 years.)

JW: Red Hat has gone from a company selling boxed versions of our own curated

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