A lot of companies are ditching proprietary technology products in favor of open-source software. Others find they’re not quite ready to forgo vendor support. This is where the open-source as a service business model comes in.

The difference between open-source projects and plug-and-play products can sometimes confuse customers, according to Paul Cormier (pictured), president of products and technologies at Red Hat Inc. For example, the open-source Kubernetes platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications).

“Kubernetes is a development project — and we all talk about that like it’s a product,” Cormier said.

To deliver an enterprise-ready Kubernetes distribution requires much piecing together of different components. “Kubernetes touches user-space [application program interfaces]; it touches kernel APIs. So unless you integrate those, and they all move forward in the life cycle of that platform at the same time, they get out of sync with each other.”

Red Hat’s OpenShift platform makes Kubernetes a usable product by actually syncing those parts for an easy end-user experience, Cormier added.

Cormier spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston. They discussed project versus product in open source and Red Hat’s latest product releases (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

It pays to swim upstream in open source

Making its enterprise products successful is Red Hat’s number one goal, according to Cormier.

“The number zero goal before that is, make the project successful. Our products can’t be successful unless we’re built on a successful project,” he said.

This is what some may miss when they foray into open-source as a product, Cormier pointed out. An open-source product maker can’t function like an absentee landlord collecting rent on a property it doesn’t actually visit and fix up regularly, he explained.

“If you’re going to base your enterprise product on an upstream project, you better have good influence in that upstream project, because when your customers ask you to address an issue or … help take it in a direction, if you don’t have that influence, you can’t satisfy your customers,” Cormier stated.

Red Hat continually gets its own hands dirty upstream in projects like Kubernetes and Linux kernel. That trickles down to releases like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, OpenShift and others, Cormier concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE