Red Hat Inc.’s crazy-enough-to-work business model of selling open-source technology in managed packages has a reverse mirror image: It’s also buying for-profit companies and spilling the tech out into the open-source community.

“We buy companies and we open-source their software, and we make it available to you as part of your subscription,” said Denise Dumas (pictured), vice president, Operating System Platform, at Red Hat Inc.

For example, the company acquired Permabit Technology Corp. — a private vendor of data-reduction solutions — last summer. Permabit’s virtual data optimizers deduplicate and compress data on the fly as it moves to disk, Dumas explained. “You might find that you’re able to shrink the amount of all that expensive storage — and expensive cloud storage, particularly — that you need significantly. And you get the compression,” she said.

This software is baked into the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system (7.5) with nothing extra for customers to buy, she added. “When you deploy 7.5 in your environment now, suddenly you’re going to need a whole lot less storage [depending on your data footprint,” Dumas stated.

Dumas spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. They discussed the evolution of open-source technology and the security advantage open-source offers. (* Disclosure below.)

Open-source sunlight is best disinfectant

Shifts in application development and deployment have brought developers and others into the security fold, according to Dumas. Whereas security was once an IT plumbing issue, it’s now the concern of everyone in an enterprise, she added.

It’s not always possible to outfit a technology or app with the shielding of an armadillo and still see it off to market at a competitive pace, Dumas explained.

“It’s always going to be a balancing act and a trade-off,” she stated. The advantage of open-sourcing technologies like Permabit and others is that it exposes them to many more contributors and watchdogs than a traditional vendor could pay for, she concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE