As Red Hat, Inc. is a strictly open-source software company, a lot of talk has been centered around how the company will convince customers that a completely open-source container solution is better than a proprietary one.

Paul Cormier, EVP of Engineering and president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, joined Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Red Hat Summit from the Moscone N & W in San Francisco, to discuss Red Hat’s position on using open-source software in container development.

Competing with partners

A number of companies that Red Hat partners with on other projects are actually its direct competitors in the container market. But the company has partnered with these competitors, such as with Google and Docker, to develop the Open Container Initiative (OCI). But because Red Hat is such a large company with many fingers in many pies, Cormier doesn’t believe this is an issue; in fact, he thinks it is inevitable.

“We’ve worked with all vendors and competitors upstream; that’s the way open source works,” said Cormier. “We’re totally fine with that.”

Why is open source good for containers?

Anyone who knows anything about open source knows that transparency is at the very heart of it. And since you have large communities of developers working toward a common goal, the final product tends to be the best of what each developer has to offer.

Red Hat’s approach to its container platform is no different. The company takes what each open community has to offer, evaluates it, and if it makes the grade, implements it in its final product.

“We’re all about what we deliver to the customer, and we accomplish that by integrating various technology pieces from various communities,” said Cormier.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE