Red Hat Summit Advocates the Power of Participation

The Linux vendor’s annual event brings news, partners and insight into how an open collaborative model can change this planet and even the worlds beyond.

The theme of Red Hat Summit 2016 was the power of participation, which was visibly demonstrated onstage with an orchestra performing ahead of Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s keynote. The message being sent was that while the individual musicians are talented, together as an orchestra they deliver an even better experience.

During his keynote address, which came off as a lesson on the history of innovation, Red Hat’s Whitehurst said that organizational hierarchies of the industrial revolution don’t work for the modern era. Instead, he advocated for an innovation-based approach, where the best ideas win and will determine human progress for the next century.

At the DevNation event, Red Hat celebrated a major milestone—10 years since it acquired application developer tools vendor JBoss. Over the last 10 years, much has happened to JBoss, with multiple new projects and development initiatives.

As a product highlight for DevNation, Red Hat announced the release of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7, providing enhanced cloud capabilities to its flagship middleware platform.

In a bid to help evolve and expand enterprise Java usage for the new era of containers and microservices, the MicroProfile Project was launched at DevNation. The goal of the MicroProfile Project is to optimize enterprise Java for a microservices architecture. It benefits from the support of such organizations as IBM, Tomitribe, Payara and Red Hat.

DevNation wasn’t just about Java this year. Microsoft and its newly open-source .NET Core were also a key topic of discussion.

Partners are always a key part of the Red Hat Summit, and among those that stood on the keynote stage this year was Cisco. Dave Ward, CTO of engineering and chief architect at Cisco, used his time on stage to talk about Cisco’s open-source efforts and to preview a new open-source platform for data analytics.

While Red Hat is in the business of open-source software, there is a growing opportunity for open-source hardware in the world. Nathan Seidle, founder and CEO of SparkFun Electronics, delivered a keynote where he explained how his open-source hardware company operates.

Elwin Loomis, senior director of Store of the Future at Target, detailed in his keynote how the retailer is remaking itself to become more innovative. Part of the drive to be more innovative at Target involves indentifying those who are “doers,” the people who are open to change and innovation. When identifying those people, Loomis grants them a Star Wars-themed challenge coin emblazoned with the Yoda quote, “Do or do not, there is no try.”

Tom Soderstrom, chief technology and innovation officer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), discussed how the nation’s space agency is embracing open-source models of innovation to advance human knowledge beyond Earth.

The Red Hat Summit keynote stage wasn’t just about technical and partner presentations this year. A real wedding ceremony took place, with Shannon Montague, an American Sign Language interpreter, and Matt Hargrave, senior Linux engineer at GM Financial, tying the knot on stage. Red Hat President and EVP Paul Cormier got his one-day marriage license to perform the ceremony. “Pushing a commit to github isn’t the same as committing to a life partner; there is no forking this project,” Cormier said as he presided over the ceremony.