451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
The Open Source Leader?
Raven Zachary, April 11, 2006 @ 11:15 pm ETIf you take a look at the About page on the Red Hat web site, the company claims to be “The Open Source Leader.” In its press releases, Red Hat describes itself as ” the world’s leading open source and Linux provider.” Up until yesterday’s JBoss acquisition announcement, I was somewhat dismissive of Red Hat’s use of this language. Not because of its leadership claim (Red Hat is an enterprise Linux leader), but because of its use of ‘open source’ instead of ‘Linux’.
Yes, Linux is open source, but open source is about much more than just Linux. While this statement may be obvious to you, it’s not universally understood, even within the IT industry. It’s a point of clarification that I make when speaking to groups of IT end users on the benefits of open source. I like to point out that plenty of Windows users are running open source software.
Why is Red Hat not instead claiming to be “The Linux Leader?” Isn’t this more descriptive? It does a better job at communicating its value to the customer, in my opinion. To me, an open source leader would need a much broader product and services offering than Red Hat has provided historically. If you sell fruit, and sell fruit well, why call yourself the food leader? With Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, the use of ‘open source’, instead of ‘Linux’, makes sense. Above, I argued that it didn’t – that was in its pre-JBoss incarnation. I guess Red Hat is an open source company, after all.
Comments (2) Categories: Linux,M&A,Software
I agree that people are often confused about the distinction between open source and Linux. However, I think Red Hat does have a legitimate claim to the title of open source leader. The value to users of RHEL is that all the open source piece parts needed to run a given workload have been integrated and tested. In so far as more businesses rely on Red Hat as their open source provider of record than they do any other provider, I do think that RH can claim title of open source leader.
You pose an interesting question Raven, in fact, if you think about it, the situation is even stranger than your fruit v food example would suggest. The “open source” branding doesn’t describe a product at all, rather it is purely a description of the development methodology/business plan.
A closer analogy might be a fruit shop calling itself “the leader in organically grown produce”.
There are a few of reasons I can think of for choosing this approach.
1. Most likely, the claim was aspirational – Red Hat has wanted to be more than ‘just’ Linux for a long time; it has had its directory server, certificate system, etc. And wanted to draw this breadth of offerings to the market’s attention. So back to your analogy, it is like a shop best known for its fruit, but wants the world to know about its bread section.
OR
2. It is a stickler for detail and realises it should really call its Linux offering GNU/Linux/GNOME/etc. Which would be a bit cumbersome in a marketing message and ‘open source is shorter’. I think this unlikely, given the way it uses ‘Linux’ elsewhere on its site.
Or
3. It wanted to put an ideological stake in the ground: “Open source is the most important thing about us, everything else can change”.
I suspect that the truth is a combination of 1 and 3. Open Source now has such a buzz around it than calling yourself the “open source leader” is a powerful marketing message. In exactly the same way being a purveyor of organic food, rather than a fruit shop can send potential customers all kinds of cues about the company’s commercial, ethical and environmental stance.
Whether the fruit tastes any better is of course a different question.