The Inquirer on Tim Burke's Keynote at LinuxCon Europe

[Karin Bakis]

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2120975/red-hat-promotes-community-linuxcon

The Inquirer
Oct. 28
Red Hat promotes the community at Linuxcon

LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Red Hat gave a behind the scenes look its role in the community and a look forward into the future at Linuxcon Europe.

Tim Burke, VP of Linux technology development at Red Hat, gave a keynote speech at Linuxcon in Prague this week. Overall he expressed that the Linux community is essential to the open source operating system's progress.

Burke drew a parallel with the phrase 'it takes a village to raise a child' when talking about the Linux community and the distribution. He said, "Linux is a crusade, it's not just what you're doing to get a pay cheque, or something like that, it's 'we're changing the world together'."

For example, Red Hat works with its partners and customers that include banks and military institutions to push the limits of what can be achieved. This includes scalability in file systems and wireless technologies, according to Burke. The company distributes both its free Fedora community distribution and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

Keen to promote Red Hat as a contributor, Burke showed us that the firm is the one of the top contributors in terms of adding lines of code to the Linux kernel and the Gnome project.

Importantly, Burke expressed how Red Hat doesn't see other distributions, such as Suse and Ubuntu as competition, recognising that each of them "add value to the ecosystem" and are collectively collaborators. He said that companies like Microsoft and VMware are the competition.

Looking forward, Burke set out the challenge of taking on Microsoft and VMware. Burke said, "It used to be, 'can we beat Solaris?' We don't ask those questions anymore. Now it's, 'we got that', so it's, 'can we continue to evolve into other market places, can we broadly take on Microsoft, VMware and others?' That's our real challenge."

We caught up with Tim Burke prior to his keynote so take a look at our video interview with him from Linuxcon.

Karin Bakis
Public Relations
Corporate Marketing
Red Hat, Inc.
Email: kbakis at redhat.com
Office: 978-392-1096
Mobile: 978-758-3546