Business

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

John Stewart doesn't talk like your typical corporate executive. He said that his company, Cisco Systems, has been lucky when it comes to security and that his company's Self-Defending Network marketing push has painted "a big bull's-eye" on its products.

We posed a few questions to Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, about why the standards body is developing network address translations for IPv6 when IPv6 was supposed to eliminate the need for NATs on the Internet. Here's what Housley had to say.

While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston last week for the annual Red Hat Summit. The former COO of Delta Air Lines sat down with Network World's Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat's moves in virtualization.

Like the future, open source is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In particular, Latin America is emerging as a real hotbed of not only free software coding, but free software uptake by governments - to an extent that puts the UK's pathetic bumblings in this area quite to shame.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we spoke to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, and in this article we chat to Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

Greg Royal founded Cistera Networks six years ago to provide a convergence server platform that connects a company's enterprise applications to telephone users, using voice over IP. Greg continues at Cistera as CTO and EVP, and writes a blog We spoke to Greg to discuss his company and its embrace of Linux in his industry.

James Fallows, national correspondent for US publication The Atlantic Monthly, has experienced "The Great Firewall of China" firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship, and he explained it in a recent article titled "The Connection Has Been Reset." We e-mailed Fallows questions about how the Chinese government controls Internet content available to its citizens, and here's what he had to say (Check out our slideshow on the 10 ways the Chinese Internet is different from yours).

Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems. Prior to that, he was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution and CTO at the Linux Foundation. Paul Krill met with Murdock at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week to talk about open source and how Sun, with its OpenSolaris version of the Solaris Unix platform, will fare in the open-source arena versus Linux.

Bill Kendrick is a software machine. He is the lead designer and developer of New Breed Software, a company creating free and open source games, libraries, tools and utilities across a range of operating systems, mobile devices, hand held and home video consoles. He has personally created a diverse range of classic Web-based games that run across all browsers, and has worked as a professional video game developer since 2003.

Since its establishment in 1970, the Palo Alto Research Center funded by Xerox has developed groundbreaking technologies, including Ethernet, the GUI (graphical user interface) and the computer mouse.

Mark Spencer, founder and CTO of Digium, has successfully given open source VoIP platform Asterisk a voice in the enterprise, thanks in large part to an ongoing commitment to community development. Here's how Spencer sees open source's best bets for seizing business opportunities.

As vice president of open source and standards at IBM, Robert Sutor is charged not only with advocating use of open source among IBM customers but also ensuring adherence to open source standards and policies within IBM. Here's how Sutor sees the open source landscape evolving.

Notorious open source advocate and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond brings colorful acumen to any open source discussion. Here's how Raymond views the continually evolving open source landscape.