These are the sort of things I find myself microblogging about on twitter and identi.ca, which may explain why my blog has been going dark the last few months as I’ve been more micro than macro.

This 15 October marked my eight year anniversary with Red Hat.  I celebrated by presenting to people in our Raleigh, NC office about the open source way.  It all comes full circle, eight+ years later people (enterprises, governments, SMBs, academia, all of that) are still coming to the acknowledged and trusted open source leaders to learn how to get this done.

1. It’s not evil.  Despite a propensity to paint Red Hat as having dark, secret motives by some members of the world, the evidence is clearly to the contrary.  Being a public company, we have to act in the best interest of shareholders.  That means keeping stuff confidential that could affect the stock price, etc.  That’s fairness and ethics.  But we also know and have clearly demonstrated as a company that we make more money for our stockholders by following the open source way.
2. We make money by doing the right thing.  Why other people have not figured this out, I don’t know.  All the open core/fauxpen core/dual-licensed business models haven’t been working as well as everyone who is their proponent claims they would do.  Our pure-play open source model is really the only sustainable one.  Why? It doesn’t incur the cost of closed source the way the other models do.
3. We’ve maintained our culture throughout the years.  Every month there are new hires at Red Hat who, bless they souls, come from Big Grown-Up Companies who Know How to Sell Software.  *sigh*  You can imagine, keeping the proper open source way culture flowing requires dealing with internal as well as external onslaughts, pressures, and personalities.  At this company, the technical people have a serious influence on adjusting the mindset of the very smart people we bring in who haven’t yet fully absorbed the open source way.
4. We make some of the best technology while participating and catalyzing in the best communities in the world.  I love the people I get to work with outside of the Red Hat walls, and I’m there able to gain some credence often because of the power of @redhat.com after my name.  Everytime I add to that brand, I know I give many more than myself that same power-of.  That same is true when I wield the power of @fedoraproject.org.
5. They’ve taken a misfit genius like me and turned me in to something useful to the world.  ‘Nuff said.

So far I’ve been happy with the nice brand exposure, which is the better secondary value the backside brings these cards.  The `fedora-business-cards` package is a slick way for any Fedora contributor to get standard and print-ready Fedora cards. Today I found a new use for the card.  I flipped one around and put it in the back of my badge holder at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.  Badges always flip backwards, and I’ve been putting my card back there for the last year. Today I showed the backside then tucked a card front-way forward on top so my name just shows.  I think I like this better now than the event printed frontside of the badge.

… Red Hat … did not abandon the little people. Instead, they found their way into a distributed and open source brand-extension plan. The other two brands, Fedora and CentOS, are not Red Hat owned.

My first thought was, “But Red Hat does own the Fedora brand?” Then I listened to myself and remembered what I’ve been learning. It is the community around a brand that owns it. Red Hat has the copyright and a trademark that it enforces, but in the case of Fedora that enforcement is specifically for supporting the freedom loving community around the brand.

That’s when I realized Donald’s article really does provide a concise and modern picture of this tribe: Red Hat + Fedora + CentOS.

Happy Birthday, CentOS.