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The road goes on forever

When Matthew Szulik stood down as Red Hat CEO in December 2007 to make way for Jim Whitehurst, he quoted Kerouac in his message to Red Hat employees. "The only people for me are the mad ones," he wrote. "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. Desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes awwwwww."

His choice of quotation may tell us something about Red Hat's view of itself as does Szulik's appraisal of those who work with and for Red Hat. "Not like the cylons who have come to dominate the industry of technology," he wrote. "Through our actions, the open source community and the people of Red Hat are defining a modern economic relationship between developer and customer."

The relative success of Red Hat's business model has turned many of the assumptions of modern business culture upside down. The company survives and thrives on its brand, the quality of the software and services it provides, and the strength of its bonds with the user and developer communities from which it sprang. Anyone can replicate its software, as Oracle has tried to prove, but the company that does so has to replicate Red Hat's relationship with its developers and its customers. As Szulik noted "What was once considered a joke in 1998, no longer is."

For other feature articles by Richard Hillesley, please see the archive.

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