With buzz going about how Singapore developers are actively participating in open source community, Infocomm live is fostering more interest in this area by bringing on Jim Whitehurst – CEO of Red Hat Inc.

IDA in collaboration with e27 and TDM conducted an Infocomm Live event with Jim Whitehurst, who shed some light on alternative open-source business models that companies can adopt in these times.

Red Hat is one of the largest open source technology solution providers, mainly known for its Enterprise Linux OS software. Red Hat’s Open Source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management

Jim talked about how there is a basic assumption ingrained in all of us that no one can make money off free software. Well, not only did Red Hat prove this to be wrong, along with it they are also one of the largest open-source contributors. This business model mainly eliminates the big question that every software solution provider goes through – “Is this needed by the customers?” With open source model the users conceptualise it, build it, test it and use it!

Red Hat earns revenue through a subscription based model. They argue that this model allows them to create a mutually beneficial, cyclical relationship with their customers: where users can benefit from  innovation in the open source software. The subscription entails access to technical support and constant update of software versions which forms the Red hat network – a solution for managing, updating and supporting the systems.

He also mentioned that other companies like Sun mainly has problems with monetization because it protects its codebase and does not have community driven model, which will let more users participate in the code process, and help in fixing bugs and other software issues.

Jim Whitehurst concluded his talk by comparing Red hat model to American Idol where people get to vote for their favorite singer, similarly users get to participate in the creation of software, and like other reality shows, these models can be easily replicated too.