This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader.

Children are taught as early as preschool that sharing is an essential part of learning to get along with others. Yet some people still can't grasp the concept of sharing code or they reject open source because of the monetary value of ideas, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Children are taught as early as preschool that sharing is an essential part of learning to get along with others. Yet some people still can't grasp the concept of sharing code or they reject open source because of the monetary value of ideas, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Red Hat's new chief executive Jim Whitehurst has admitted his company needs to improve its approach to its customers and partners.

Red Hat, Inc. today announced that President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will deliver the keynote address at the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) Software Summit & CODiE Awards.

In an eWEEK interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company is "defining a whole new business model" by applying collaborative principles similar to those behind Facebook and Wikipedia. Whitehurst speaks out on open source business models, RHEL 5.4's KVM hypervisor, and the cloud.

Red Hat can't match Microsoft or Oracle's marketing budgets, but the open source paradigm gives it an advantage in the long term, chief executive Jim Whitehurst told eWEEK Europe.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53% of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit.

When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company's new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst's chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.