The open source software development model allows us to use the collective input,
resources and knowledge of global communities of contributors who collaborate
to develop, maintain and enhance software.
We develop our enterprise offerings by working with these open source development
communities, often in a leadership role. Red Hat sponsors a number of open source
communities, including the Fedora Project, GlusterFS, the JBoss community projects
and OpenShift Origin. We are also an active participant in other communities
such as OpenStack. Our role helps us to benefit from the efforts of these communities,
which we believe allows us to reduce both development cost and time and enhance
acceptance and support of our offerings and technologies. Additionally, the
open and transparent nature of these communities provides our customers and
potential customers with access and insights into, and the ability to influence,
the future direction of our enterprise offerings.
Under the open source licensing model, a software developer distributes the
human-readable source code version of the software under an open source license,
such as the GNU General Public License (“GPL”) or GNU Lesser General
Public License. Open source licenses provide relatively broad rights for recipients
of the software to use, copy, modify and redistribute the software. These rights
afford significant latitude for recipients to inspect, suggest changes, customize
or enhance the software.
The open source model provides an inherent level of transparency and choice
that contrasts with the proprietary software model. Under the proprietary software
model, a software vendor generally develops the software itself or acquires
components from other vendors, without the input from a wider community of participants.
The vendor generally licenses to the user only the machine-readable binary (or
object) code version of the software, with no or limited rights to copy, modify
or redistribute the software, and does not make the underlying source code available
to the user or other developers. Moreover, peer review and collaborative enhancements
are more difficult because of the lack of access to the source code.
The growth of the Internet has greatly increased the scale and efficiency of
open source software development through the availability of collaborative technologies,
such as email lists, code repositories and websites. These technologies have
enabled a global community of developers to collaborate on more complex open
source projects, many of which are commercially funded.
We believe that open source software is a viable and arguably superior alternative
to traditional proprietary software for the enterprise customer. Open source
software, as compared to proprietary software, offers a number of benefits,
including:
enabling an enterprise customer’s in-house development team to collaborate
and innovate with a global community of independent developers and testers;
providing an enterprise customer’s in-house development team access to
both binary and source code, and broader rights to copy, modify and redistribute
the software;
offering an enterprise customer greater flexibility through
open rather than proprietary protocols and formats; permitting an enterprise
customer ongoing access to improvements made to the software that are distributed
by others; and allowing an enterprise customer to inspect and help diagnose
problems more easily and customize the software to suit its particular needs.