Jack Aboutboul

Fedora, Red Hat, and open brands

A Twitter friend asked me the other day if I had been doing any more thinking about open brands. Turns out I have. Two weeks ago, she and I had a conversation where we discussed how Red Hat had opened up the Fedora brand and the positives (tons!) and negatives (some) of doing so.

This week, on an plane ride up to Boston, I read the book The Open Brand by Kelly Mooney, which another friend had handed to me a while back.

The book is a eulogy for brands that are not willing to open themselves up, and an instruction manual for those that are considering becoming more open.

It was particularly interesting to read as a Red Hat guy, because the book is based on the idea that today’s single most powerful technology is “a mashup of the World Wide Web and the open source movement.”

The book opens with the question… “are you dangerously CLOSED?”

Whew… passed that one. But the book did make me think some about where the Red Hat brands fall on the spectrum of closed to open.

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