UPDATED 16:37 EDT / MAY 25 2023

INFRA

The future of open source: Red Hat CTO weighs in on acceleration, innovation and integrity

As the dynamics of open-source computing continue to shift and evolve, industry leaders are aiming to keep the pace and match expectations.

This week’s Red Hat Summit event provided a venue where innovation and community merged, where a focus on collaboration and automation to reduce infrastructure costs and support business growth headlined the event.

“We are talking about different ways that we can look at helping enterprises reduce some of their costs, build a lot of consistency and think about automation to reduce the cost of running the infrastructure and running the business,” said Chris Wright (pictured), chief technology officer and senior vice president of global engineering at Red Hat Inc. “Then, what can we do to help developers be more impactful and help businesses generally grow? AI is a part of that, but it’s not the only piece.”

Wright spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Paul Gillin at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the changing landscape of open source and the future of the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Accelerating innovation with key partnerships

Red Hat’s partnership with organizations such as IBM Corp. and the integration of artificial intelligence is a testament to the fast-paced innovation in the industry. The importance of this collaboration and the resulting product acceleration for customers is critical, according to Wright.

“Innovation just keeps speeding up across the industry,” he said. “We have so much collaboration happening in open-source communities, and more and more people come into those communities, and that just speeds up the pace of development.”

Security remains a top priority for the enterprise, and Red Hat continues to work on building trust in the software supply chain. The importance of understanding where the code is coming from and its journey to production is critical, Wright explained.

On the topic of sustainability, Wright stressed the importance of reducing power consumption.

“The whole world is grappling with our global climate challenge, and software and software systems, hardware at the bottom of the stack are a part of that,” he said. “We’re enabling power-saving features, as we always have, with our hardware partners, but then taking that further with a project like Kepler.”

Open source: Riding the AI wave

As AI is set to accelerate development at an unprecedented pace, open source is an organic model that can grow and adapt naturally, according to Wright.

“Open source is a way of doing development. It’s a big, distributed, resilient, organic model. As a result, growth is a fairly natural part of the open-source development model,” he said.

Despite the challenges that may arise with the acceleration of AI, Wright remains optimistic about the future of open source. The focus should be on machine-assisted human intelligence rather than replacing human creativity with AI, he explained.

“We’re not at a place where we’re replacing the creativity of humans,” he stated.

The future of open source promises exciting developments as industry leaders like Red Hat continue to foster innovation and integrity while meeting evolving customer needs. The key, according to Wright, is maintaining collaboration, resilience and a focus on human creativity in the face of rapid technological advancements.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for the Red Hat Summit event. Red Hat Inc. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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