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RedHat founder Bob Young on business development: open source approach fosters innovation
Featuring...

  • Bob Young
    Founder of lulu.com, entrepreneur and record breaker on the NYSE...
Online entrepreneur Bob Young shares technology and business advice as he tells the story of how RedHat beat the proprietary software Goliath:

When we started winning these literally global level awards for the products we were doing yet we were still a small team. Our team of course got big heads about it and all the journalists treated them like they were geniuses or something. The problem is I knew these guys, I went out and drank beer with them. Our engineers were good guys and certainly as motivated but they were no more motivated than any of the other guys I had met at Microsystems or Apple or IBM. In terms of sheer qualifications all the best engineers on the planet were being recruited away by the top technology companies. It is one of the problems as an entrepreneur is that you don’t get the first dibs on the smartest kids coming out of technology schools. They all get these incredible offers from Google these days or Microsoft or IBM. So our guys were good but they were not special, ok there were special because I loved them to bits. But they weren’t in any way smarter than the teams we were competing with. What they had is they had a better engineering model. They didn’t have to be proprietary.

Every night our engineers posted every line of code that they had been working on that day to the internet. We had no proprietary interest in it because we needed the help of the thousands of other engineers out there. So we had no security codes and it just was out there. We didn’t have to spend any money on protecting out intellectual property because our model only worked if we shared what we were doing and by sharing what we were doing we had a better engineering model than our much bigger competitors.
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