As Red Hat Enterprise Linux turns 10, focus shifts to the cloud

Red Hat celebrated the 10th anniversary of its flagship Enterprise Linux product, but reaffirmed the decision to shift focus to cloud computing, pledging that open-source roots would be key to success in the new business venture.

The company plans to release Enterprise Linux 7 in in late 2013, but offered little during a Tuesday press conference on what to expect. What may play a large part in the new release is a focus on the cloud. For all intents and purposes, Red Hat believes Linux is in the past and the cloud is the future.

Intel is a part of this, and in congratulating Red Hat on its milestone noted the two companies' work in datacenter virtualization. "Intel and Red Hat have collaborated for years on Linux and open virtualization, bringing innovative datacenter technologies to market", Intel Systems Software Division vice president Doug Fisher says in a statement. "We look forward to our continuing collaboration and innovation in key areas such as open, trusted, and federated clouds, as well as mission-critical platforms based on open source software and Intel Architecture".

Red Hat believes open-source will help it build a dominant cloud business. Competitors VMware and Microsoft rely heavily on their own proprietary technologies, with little support from the developer community at large. Red Hat's embrace of open source has allowed the company to rely not only on its in-house developers but the ingenuity of the community.

Some may see it as a way of making money off the backs of others, but Red Hat has no regrets on embracing open source. Engineering chief Paul Cormier credits the decision to move to an open-source subscription model in 2002 as the decision that made Red Hat into the Linux powerhouse it is today.

That same concept will be used as RedHat moves to the cloud, and will give the company more mobility in adapting to the needs of developers. While it takes a little bit of hubris to say at such an early stage in cloud computing that your company will lead the industry, Red Hat certainly has its work with Enterprise Linux to back up its words.