Red Hat CEO Whitehurst Blasts Software Patents

Consolidation?

Whitehurst deftly batted away the suggestion that Red Hat should buy Novell – rescuing the company which owns the Unix brand from hostile hedge funds and the shaky virtues of its controversial alliance with Microsoft.

But other acquisitions could be on the cards, even though the company has not bought many other companies since the merger of the JBoss middleware firm.

“We generate lots of cash, and are sitting on a massive opportunity in the cloud,” he said. “you will likely see an increase in our pace of acquisitions – though there is nothing upcoming.”

Government adoption slow

“Governments around the world are proactive in looking at open source,” he said, “even more than the private sector”

He is surprisingly positive about governments which have made statements about public sector open source procurement, even though the open source community ridicules these policies, because they usually turn out to be lip service from companies which are closely tied in with proprietary software vendors.

Whitehurst’s colleagues talk up an apparent move to adopt open source for government IT in India but, closer to home, he has little to add to the suit his company started against the Swiss government for issuing a closed tender for Microsoft desktops.

That suit apparently went nowhere – but it was “an exception”, said Whitehurst, who thinks that most governments do mean what they are saying when they promise to adopt open source, and just need helping on the way. “The Swiss thing was an anomaly. We rarely have to go to the governments and say we need you to be more open.”

“Because of the size, government IT is usually big projects,” he said. “Those integrators want to provide the best value, and that will be what they know best.”

The way to change it is to work with systems integrators: “it takes time to build an open source skillset out.”

And in the end, all that is needed is a level playing field, and the better value of open source will push governments towards it more effectively than any regulations.

Resisting software patents

Following from public policy, Whitehurst re-affirmed Red Hat’s opposition to software patents. “They are detrimental to innovation, and we do not support them at all.”

Patents are especially problematic in an open layered architecture, he explained, where innovation on a high layer could depend on technology on a lower layer – and be put in jeopardy if that is encumbered by patents.

“Software patents would have a huge cost and an unclear value,” he says, quoting Steve Jobs, who pointed out that it would not be impossible for anyone to develop a fresh video codec that doesn’t violate any patents. “How is that good for innovation?”

Red Hat does apply for patents, of course – but Whitehurst says the company does not collect revenues. “We’re not locking up technology, but protecting it.”

So Red Hat appears to be going unchanged on its mission, even if some of its most ambitions plans will take a while to realise.