Ecosystem

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

Goals

1. An ecosystem of partners (either companies or educational institutions) participating in open source via the Red Hat family (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS)
2. An enhanced reputation for Red Hat as a thought-leader and expert in implementing ideas via an open-source community strategy.
3. A dramatically improved experience for end users and potential customers. Present a one-stop shop for users to evaluate and purchase open source solutions.

ISV strategies

Stragetic open source ISVs come to us from two places:

1. Those defined by RHX, and working with that part of the company.
2. Those who come to us through any other channel, whose commitment to open source we find compelling.

Prioritization

THE MORE PURE A COMPANY'S COMMITMENT TO OPEN SOURCE IS, THE HIGHER PRIORITY WE GIVE THEM IN TRYING TO HELP.

• ISVs who are pure open source plays, and who are ready to commit time and engineering resources of their own into getting their stuff into Fedora are considered premiere accounts, and get high-touch attention from us.
• Community Architecture team needs to develop a stable of package maintainers in Fedora who are willing to take ISVs under their wing as they work to get things into Fedora and EPEL. This begins to feel like the idea of community consulting, a little bit. Or your "community TAM". We need folks with Fedora packaging expertise to be willing to hand-hold our most important partners as they dip their feet in the Fedora waters.
• Similarly, for the low-touch "accounts" or the folks who aren't too serious about devoting resources, we need to develop a wiki page that lays out the process that we are taking the more committed folks through. Good documentation practices will get us most of the way there.
• If we were really feeling motivated, we'd ask some consultants what a reasonable price for these kinds of services is, and convince Rachel Cassidy to help us sell it. (Max has already started to investigate this).

Actions

• Using FUDCon Boston and OSCON as meeting places for ISVs.
• Identifying the pilot ISVs (mostly determined by which ISVs are most willing to step up) and using them to refine our "ISVs get their software into Fedora/EPEL" apprenticeship process.

Education strategies

• Ultimately, Jack's education deck will provide backup support for this section.
• Small, innovative partners who are nimble enough to try and to do exciting things. Seneca. NCSSM.
• Large, established names that can draw us big press. Carnegie Mellon, which is a priority account insofar as they are actively working with us. But places like MIT, Caltech, etc. remain "strategic" in that if we can do something cool with them, it will get us great press.
• FIXME -- do we mention LTSP at this point? We are still supporting Warren in his efforts to work with them, but there is no larger plan yet, IMHO, that is compelling enough for Michael.

Actions

• Jack is working on a separate slide deck/pitch that brings together all our education strategies in greater depth.
• Actively pursuing a deal with CMU for a linux lab/curriculum.
• Trip to Oregon State University planned during OSCON.
  • FIXME -- add one of two of the big goals we hope to get out of that trip.

Awareness strategy

• Continue to look for opportunities to speak at events in which the right-minded sorts of people will be in attendance, and aggressively pursue any leads that come out of that.
  • Max has 3 talks scheduled in Europe + FUDCon from July - September.
  • Paul will speak at Utah Open Source convention.
  • Greg and Paul will be FSOSS in Toronto along with ChrisTyler of Seneca College.