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Jan. 29, 2010

Red Hat feels that there's a bit more room for a larger Linux community and has launched opensource.com. The site's mission is to share new ideas, look at various ongoing development projects and talk about what's happening in the open source as well as in the Linux community.

In a blog post introducing the new site, Red Hat CEO Him Whitehurst said the company's intent is to provide "a connection point for conversations about the broader impact that open source can have, even beyond the software world."

Whitehurst spoke of creating dialog and connecting people, applying the lessons of open source broadly, and dreams for some long-term changes in the community.

Dubbed "a Red Hat community service," opensource.com is designed to be a place to meet for open sourcer developers, providing "a gathering place for many of the open source stories we'd like to share through articles, audio, web presentations, video, or open discussion."

The new website is divided into channels devoted to various areas of interest: Business, Education, Government, Law and Life.

Articles — several dozen of which are already available — cover topics from vendor lock-in to health care and even so-called black holes.

Although the site is heavily sponsored by Red Hat, Whitehurst stressed that it is a community venture: "All new ideas are welcome, and all participants are also welcome. This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat. Instead this will be a site for open source, and about the future of open source."

Site users will have the opportunity to comment on the site's content, and contribute to it themselves — in the spirit of open source. All content submitted is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Users must agree to CCA licensing during registration in order to be eligible to read articles.

That certainly isn't to suggest the site will be a free-for-all, however. Although users can submit content, each channel is moderated by an expert in the subject, drawn from Red Hat's staff.

The current list of people includes Red Hat's general counsel, the head of Red Hat Government, and a former Fedora board chairman, among others.

The moderators will also serve as a point of contact for their channel, and will field proposals from anyone interested in submitting open source, MySQL, PHP or Linux articles.

Whether or not the site will change the world remains to be seen, but for the moment, il looks like it is headed in the right direction.

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Source: Red Hat.

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