Joining Red Hat

April 16, 2012 community, freesoftware, work 30 Comments

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!