i, quaid

Although some people in open source communities might not be aware of him, Paul Cormier holds a singular position in the open source world. This hinges on the detail that Red Hat is the longest standing and most successful company at promoting the growth of free/open source software and especially the acceptance of that software in the enterprise (large businesses.) Paul is a Red Hat EVP, but he is also the President of Products and Technologies, meaning he is ultimately accountable for what Red Hat does in creating products the open source way. Paul has held this position essentially for the last dozen years, and so has overseen everything in Red Hat from the creation of Fedora Linux to the rise of cloud computing that Red Hat is an intimate part of.

In other words, when Paul C. speaks — keynote or in-person — he is someone really worth paying close attention to.

In this post on Red Hat’s open source community website, “One Year Later:  Paul Cormier on Red Hat and the CentOS Project“, I provide some introduction and background around a video interview Paul did with ServerWatch about the Red Hat and CentOS Project relationship.

(Speaking of ‘intimately’, that explains my relationship to Red Hat and the CentOS Project — I spent all of 2013 architecting and delivering on making CentOS Linux the third leg in the stool of Red Hat platform technologies. When I say in the “One Year Later…” article about “making sure (Paul C. is) happy and excited about Red Hat joining forces with the CentOS Project,” that responsibility is largely mine.)