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“Driving innovation means giving up control,” he noted. “Innovation rarely comes from the boardroom or executive suite, it comes from much closer to the customer.” But, he added, individual organizations are not enough. “We see from nature that the most robust ecosystems require diversity,” he pointed out. “It’s incredibly difficult to orchestrate in one organization.”

That is where the open source movement’s strengths lie – in building the capabilities for communities to innovate beyond the sum of their individual members. Whitehurst reminded attendees that today, behemoths like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and even Microsoft (who was a major conference sponsor and participated in the keynote, to the bemusement of many) contribute to open source projects, because they see more value in opening and creating an ecosystem than they do by remaining closed. And everything Red Hat does is pushed back to the community; its developers even contribute to projects that could be considered competition.

Even products from acquisitions – and there have been many over the years – are contributed to open source as soon as practical. But what counts to Whitehurst is the people. In fact, he said, when Red Hat bought platform as a service provider Makara in 2010, it threw away the technology.

“We really bought the people,” he said.

User-driven innovation is important, he said. Red Hat rarely starts an open source project. Instead, it watches the community and gets involved where it sees it can add value.