An Interview with Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Program Office, Red Hat
How does Open Source innovation work in vertical industry communities? To explore the inroads of Open Source Software in vertical industry use cases and applications I have invited a real expert in this field: Leslie Hawthorn, responsible for vertical community strategy in Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO).
Leslie talks about her role in Red Hat and why Red Hat is engaging in vertical communities. She explains how vertical communities with different rules of engagement try to leverage Open Source technologies and how Red Hat engages through active participation and expertise.
Sometimes these communities start to architect special solutions that can be applied to a wider range of use cases outside of this market, too.
Leslie also describes the important role of software foundations like The Linux Foundation, The Apache Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. They can play a fundamental role in providing a structure for the collaboration, acting as a neutral body that allows for collaboration among competing organizations.
Red Hat participates in these foundations mainly by bringing in engineers to get work done rather than just getting our logo on the page.
In the future, Open Source Software will likely play a similar dominant role in the vertical communities, because the collaborative development model provides a competitive advantage over organizations that pursue their goals on their own.
See the full interview here: