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Red Hat is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Open Health Tools (OHT) open source community. OHT is working closely with a broad spectrum of healthcare groups, including: major national healthcare providers in areas such as Canada, Australia and the UK; healthcare standards groups like IHTSDO and HL7; healthcare policy groups such as HSSP; and software providers such as Red Hat. OHT’s ultimate goal is to collaboratively build software tooling that will enable the seamless electronic exchange of healthcare data. This is an ambitious goal, but with incremental steps, we think it can be achieved.
The first OHT project is the HL7 tooling project, which will take some of today’s HL7 tooling to the next level.
We are tremendously excited about the potential enhancements that open source can provide to the healthcare industry. Semantic interoperability is a huge challenge, and we believe the only way that we can achieve this goal is through a collaborative, open source development model that brings together all stakeholders.
It’s no secret that Red Hat is a leading contributor to the development of open source software. In fact, as noted by a couple of recent surveys, Red Hat is the leading corporate contributor to the most important open source project of all, the Linux Kernel.
Last week, the Linux Foundation published a report about Linux kernel development and we were recognized as the leading corporate contributor with over 9,000 changes contributed, or 11.2 percent of the total. And we were also recognized a few months ago by Linux Weekly News as the most active company contributor both by changesets (12 percent) and by lines changed (12.7 percent) in the development of the 2.6.23 kernel. The results for these two reports are summarized in the following table:
| Top 6 Corporate Contributors | |||||
| Linux Foundation | Linux Weekly News | ||||
| Company Name | Changes | % of total | Company Name | Changes | % of total |
| None | 11,594 | 13.0% | Unknown | 1,180 | 19.0% |
| Unknown | 10,803 | 12.9% | Red Hat | 744 | 12.0% |
| Red Hat | 9,351 | 11.2% | None | 559 | 9.0% |
| Novell | 7,385 | 8.9% | IBM | 507 | 8.2% |
| IBM | 6,952 | 8.3% | Novell | 421 | 6.8% |
| Intel | 3,388 | 4.1% | Intel | 184 | 3.0% |
Today, Red Hat took a public stand challenging the standards for patenting software. In the Biliski case that is now before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, this patent issue is ripe for consideration. In a friend of the court brief submitted to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in the Bilski case today, Red Hat describes the special problems that patents pose for open source and seeks modification of the standards for patentable subject matter that take open source into account. Here is a quick summary of our brief.
Open source software is one of the most dynamic, innovative sectors of the U.S. economy, but the U.S. patent system is a costly hindrance to open source innovation. We believe that although the patent system was created to foster innovation, it’s simply not an engine for innovation for open source. Software patents were barely recognized when open source began, and so the hope of obtaining a patent did not motivate the first developers. Those pioneers were generally opposed to software patents. The open, collaborative activity at the heart of open source is at odds with the patent system, which excludes the public from making, using or selling a patented invention. Open source developers seek to contribute code to the community – not to exclude others from using the code.
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For the last few years, Red Hat has been a regular fixture at the RSA Conference, and this year will be no different. We will be showing the recently open sourced Certificate System Dogtag project and we’ll be launching the beta program for Red Hat Enterprise IPA. Red Hat Enterprise IPA is a new product, scheduled for release mid-year, that is based on the open source freeIPA, centralized Identity, Policy and Audit project. At the Red Hat booth at RSA, we will have a demo showing the high-level features of Red Hat Enterprise IPA, so if you are interested in participating in the beta program please visit us at the show, or sign up for more information about the beta.
Identity and access management is important for reasons of efficiency, risk reduction and compliance. Existing solutions are either no longer compliant (NIS), expensive or not that easy to use (do-it-yourself LDAP and perhaps Kerberos). Red Hat’s acquisition of Netscape’s Directory Server and Certificate System was just the start of our identity and access management strategy.
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After hard work by our engineers to incorporate feature requests from users, we’re ready to unwrap the latest version of Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite with today’s availability of RHN Satellite 5.1. With Satellite, customers are granted comprehensive life cycle management with tools to manage systems, provision new systems, manage updates, monitor performance and more. RHN Satellite 5.1 includes some of the newest features that were born directly from issue tracker tickets submitted by customers, with added feedback from the dedicated RHN Satellite community. Thanks to all, today we’re able to provide the next version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Management platform. Here are some of the highlights in RHN Satellite 5.1:
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At the end of last week, we reported the results for Red Hat’s Fiscal 4th quarter and Fiscal Year 2008. Initial street reaction to our announcement was positive and has been reflected in the press and through trading in the days since the call. Some earnings highlights include:
4Q08 financial highlights
FY08 financial highlights
Red Hat was disappointed but hardly surprised that the single-vendor, monopolist-promulgated standard, Office Open XML, made it though an unfortunately flawed fast-track ISO approval process. We also note that there remains an ongoing investigation by the European competition authorities into the practices employed in the process.
So, if you define interoperability as single vendor’s format to promote operation with that same vendor’s dominant product, you can declare victory. But Red Hat thinks governments and enterprises are not so easily confused. The Open Document Format, which has long been a multiparty-supported ISO standard, will continue to be a force in procurement decisions to be reckoned with. Government and Enterprises are tired of the lack of choice, lack of innovation, and premium rents from vendor lock-in. We doubt anyone will be confused by this outcome.
Approaching its one-year anniversary in May, Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has some exciting new updates. We’ve added two new partners already in 2008: Ingres and Hyperic. And, today, RHX will take on a new look with a refresh of the RHX website.
RHX launched last year with the goal of helping Red Hat’s customers engage with the open source ISV ecosystem. During the 11 months since we’ve been in the market, we’ve learned a lot about the best way to meet that goal. In some cases, we learned what didn’t work and made changes to the offering.
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