In 2002, Linux was on its way to becoming a major business operating system, but it wasn’t there yet. Then, Red Hat dedicated itself to make Linux an enterprise operating system. Ten years later Red Hat was the first billion dollar pure play open-source company. Today, Red Hat announced a similar plan for the OpenStack cloud.

Just as with Linux, Red Hat knows there’s no way it can make OpenStack the de facto cloud software of choice for the enterprise by itself. In a blog posting, Red Hat’s OpenStack team wrote, “A huge community is contributing to OpenStack. More than 180 participating companies and 400 contributing developers have produced six software releases in just a little over two years. Some organizations will choose to leverage all that innovation directly by implementing, testing, patching and supporting community releases on their own.”

Others, such as Boris Renski of Mirantis, a major OpenStack system integrator, worry that new OpenStack member VMware will undermine OpenStack. Red Hat certainly has no love for VMware. In 2011, Red Hat declared VMware its biggest enemy. But, Red Hat isn’t worried. It has faith both in OpenStack and its plan on how to turn it into a profitable business as well as great software. 

Red Hat plans to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux. More >