Episode 52: Being Willing to be Open: Twenty Years of Coding at Red Hat, with Tom "Spot" Callaway

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Panelists Eric Berry | Richard Littauer Guest Tom Callaway
Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we
have special guest, Tom Callaway, currently working at AWS, but
previously at Red Hat for almost twenty years, doing pretty much
every job they had. We will find out all about Red Hat and all the
positions Tom held there. We will also learn why Red Hat was the
right people, the right place, at the right time, with the right
seed funding to get it done. How did Red Hat figure out how to
compete meaningfully and how did they deliver value above and
beyond the bits? Tom has stories to tell and advice to share.
Download this episode now to find out this and much more!
[00:01:40] Tom tells us what he did before working for AWS and how
he started at Red Hat. [00:03:58] Richard asks Tom what some of the
main changes are that he has seen and how it’s affected things.
[00:09:23] Eric wants to know from Tom at what point when he was
working at Red Hat, did everybody start believing that maybe this
is something, maybe this can survive, and this will become
something huge. He tells us one of the big things that impacted Red
Hat early on. [00:14:30] Richard wants to know how Red Hat pitched
to developers that they want to get this and how did they pitch up
to their managers. [00:16:53] Tom fills us in on the strategy that
has been worked successfully for Red Hat. [00:19:12] Red Hat seemed
to lead the charge in making open source a core part of the company
and the culture. Tom tells us what it was like working with a
company that had that type of focus giving back to the community.
[00:24:35] Richard is curious to know if there was any time when
things didn’t work well at Red Hat and competition got out of hand
and being in the open, ended up screwing over something. [00:29:25]
Richard asks Tom what he would say to developers who have something
and then want to go out and make something out of it and does he
think there’s models outside of sticking with large open source
companies to sustainability live a middle-class life. Tom gives
some awesome stories and advice here. [00:40:54] Tom tells us where
we can find him on the internet. Spotlight [00:41:50] Eric’s
spotlight is developers.redhat.com. [00:42:54] Richard’s spotlight
is a small project called Vesper
(https://github.com/HaroldMills/Vesper) by Harold Mills. [00:44:20]
Tom’s spotlight is OctoPrint. Quotes [00:05:24] “When I joined Red
Hat there was no semblance of a reasonable business model at all.
We made more money selling hats on our website than we did selling
software.” [00:20:01] “One of the things that’s unique about Red
Hat is the employment contracts are structured in a way such that
they explicitly say Red Hat doesn’t own the open source work that
you do. You own it. You can go out and do whatever you want.”
[00:22:50] “And I was able to just by being curious and by being
passionate, move into roles all the way up into the CTO’s office.”
[00:31:39] “I think you have to be willing to have the freedom to
be open.” [00:32:10] “If you write amazing software and you can
never apply it in a real-world scenario, your company will die. If
you cannot figure out how to compete meaningfully with the
software, it does not matter how good it is, your company will
die.” Links Tom Callaway Twitter
(https://twitter.com/spotfoss?lang=en) AWS
(https://aws.amazon.com/) [Raspberry Pi Hacks: Tips & Tools for
Making Things with the Inexpensive Linux Computer by Ruth Suehle
and Tom
Callaway](https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Hacks-Inexpensive-Computer/dp/1449362346/ref=sr11?ie=UTF8&qid=1506520213&sr=8-1&keywords=raspberry+pi+hacks)
Red Hat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat) Red Hat Developer
(https://developers.redhat.com/) Harold Mills/Vesper
(https://libraries.io/github/HaroldMills/Vesper) OctoPrint
(https://octoprint.org/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer
(https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree
Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Ad Sales by Eric
Berry Special Guest: Tom "Spot" Calloway.