Joining Red Hat

7:09 pm community, freesoftware, work

I’m joining Red Hat on May 2nd, where I’ll be working with the Open Source and Standards team. We’ll be working hard to help all of the projects that Red Hat contributes to kick ass at growing community. I have known several of the team from years gone past, and interviewing for the position was frankly a pleasure.

I’d like to thank Karsten Wade for thinking of me and making the connections back in February. When my future boss described the position and the team to me around then, and asked me whether I might be interested, I couldn’t help myself from saying “I think you just described my dream job”. I know you’re supposed to show restraint and play hard to get in these situations, but I got carried away.

Red Hat is one of the few companies out there that could tempt me away from independent consulting. They have a range of projects covering the server, desktop, middleware, cloud services and virtualisation. They are the top, or one of the top, corporate contributors to dozens of projects I use every day. I love the Red Hat philosophy of working with communities to make great Free and Open Source software.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything is roses. There are projects within Red Hat (or that Red Hat contributes heavily to) which need to improve their community processes, that could do a better job of promoting themselves, or that have hung on to former business models post-acquisition, at the expense of community growth. And it’ll be our job to fix those issues. It’ll be challenging, it’ll be a slow, incremental process. But I have no doubt that it will be very rewarding. I’m looking forward to it!

30 Responses

  1. John (J5) Palmieri Says:

    Congrats Dave! Glad to have you on the Red Hat team.

  2. Juanjo Marin Says:

    Congrats !

  3. Greg Grossmeier Says:

    Congrats! Sounds like your dream job, indeed!

  4. Antimonio Says:

    Let me guess: in the last paragraph you’re referring to JBOSS 😀

  5. Michael Says:

    Welcome in the french office, hope to see you from time to time in the office 🙂

  6. Andrew Overholt Says:

    Congrats, Dave!

  7. Jonathan Blandford Says:

    Welcome aboard!

  8. Mark Wielaard Says:

    Congrats and welcome!

  9. Jonh Wendell Says:

    Hey Dave, great news, congrats! Cheers!

  10. Eitan Says:

    Congrats!

  11. Jared Smith Says:

    Congrats Dave — you’ll do great on the team, and the team will be better because of your contributions 🙂

  12. Lucas Rocha Says:

    Congrats! Great news!

  13. Harish Pillay Says:

    Looking forward to seeing you in Red Hat!

    Harish

  14. RubenV Says:

    Congratulations Dave! Enjoy the red Fedora!

  15. Andy Fitzsimon Says:

    Congrats Dave! & welcome.
    This is some really exciting news – it’ll be great to call you my colleague.

  16. Baptiste Mille-Mathias Says:

    congrats Dave,

    how long before RedHat hires the whole members of GNOME-fr ? 🙂

  17. Vincent Untz Says:

    Congratulations! It sounds like an amazing job, and a very good fit for you 🙂

  18. Seif Lotfy Says:

    Congrats 😀
    I think it is the perfect position for you.

  19. Ludovic Poitou Says:

    Congratulations Dave !
    Looks like the Red Hat team in Rhone-Alpes is really strengthening.

  20. Emrah Says:

    Congradulations. Welcome on board..

  21. Zeeshan Ali Says:

    Cool! Welcome to the club of most awesome people on the planet.

  22. Federico Mena Quintero Says:

    Wow, congratulations!

  23. Marina Zhurakhinskaya Says:

    Congrats Dave! That’s fantastic news!

  24. Zeeshan Ali Says:

    Just realized that you are joining Red Hat on exactly the same day I joined last year: May 2nd 🙂

  25. Emmanuele Says:

    congrats on the new job!

  26. Dave Neary Says:

    Well, happy anniversary Zeeshan!

  27. Jono Bacon Says:

    Congratulations, Dave! All the best in the new role…I am sure you do a rocking job. 🙂

  28. Sankarshan Says:

    Congratulations Dave ! This is going to be a nice gig and the team will benefit from the depth of your experience.

  29. Higginbotham Says:

    Congrats. Scary amount of people joining Red Hat these days… would prefer to see the talent spread a bit more diversely around our community to be honest, but you can’t have everything…

  30. thp Says:

    Great news, Dave – and good luck 🙂

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