‘All Things Open’ Revives the OpenSource.com Community Abandoned by Red Hat

The All Things Open organization is picking up the baton abandoned by Red Hat when it quit publishing OpenSource.com.

All Things Open has brought back OpenSource.com!

They can’t call it that because Red Hat still owns the domain name (and perhaps the trademark), but All Things Open has revised the OpenSource.com community website idea that Jim Whitehurst started back when he was Red Hat’s CEO, in order to push open source ideas without advertising the company he led, or pushing its products or services. ATO is publishing its version on the All Things Open website, under the name We Love Open Source.

For those who don’t know, All Things Open is about the only large enterprise-focused and not-vendor-specific open source conference on the planet that can compete with Open Source Summit, KubeCon, and other events staged by Linux Foundation. This year’s event is scheduled to take place next week — October 27-29 — at the Raleigh Convention Center in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, just blocks away from Red Hat’s headquarters.

In addition to October’s big tent event, in recent years the conference has expanded to include at least one separate free introductory level conference each year, Open Source 101, as well as free monthly “Meetups” that are held at various venues in and around North Carolina’s Triangle, a metropolitan area that encompasses Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill (as well as Research Triangle Park).

Now it’s expanded further by creating its own version of OpenSource.com, a project that Red Hat has abandoned under IBM’s ownership. ATO’s been careful not to publicly make that connection, however. In a recent interview, Jason Hibbets — who runs the project — simply said that We Love Open Source was requested by the open source community, but made no mention of its predecessor.

“The community has been asking for this for a number of years,” he told Todd Lewis, ATO’s creator and chairperson. “We’re finally able to bring an educational resource in the form of blogs, howtos, and tutorials to the All Things Open community. More importantly, it’s by the All Things Open community, so the majority of the content is coming from our network of speakers and contributors. Very little of the content is coming from the ATO team. We’re sourcing that content from the community.”

OpenSource.com

If the words “All Things Open community” are replaced by “open source community,” then what Hibbets said exactly describes what OpenSource.com became under Whitehurst’s leadership at Red Hat. The company had inherited the domain name many years earlier, evidently with the caveat that the company couldn’t use it for commercial purposes. It went live on January 24, 2010 with an inaugural post by Whitehurst called Welcome to the Conversation on Opensource.com, which pretty much spelled out what was planned for the site:

“At Red Hat, we’ve used open source principles as the backbone of a successful technology company. We know there are opportunities to apply ‘the open source way’ broadly in business, in government, in education, in the law, and throughout our lives.

This site is one of the ways in which Red Hat gives something back to the open source community. Our desire is to create a connection point for conversations about the broader impact that open source can have–and is having–even beyond the software world.

We think of this site as a “Red Hat community service.” Meaning: all ideas are welcome, and all participants are welcome.

This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat. Instead this will be a site for open source, about the future.”

Whitehurst was true to his word, and for more than 13 years the site published at least one, but usually two or more articles each day. As promised, the site never looked like an ad for Red Hat — in fact you wouldn’t know that the site was connected with Red Hat if not for a copyright notice at the bottom of each page, and a discrete “sponsored by” notice that featured Red Hat’s logo at the top of each page.

In early May of last year, new content on the site quit being published. This happened at the same time that Red Hat announced a large round of layoffs that included nearly everybody involved with the OpenSource.com project — including Jason Hibbets, who as Red Hat’s community director had a leadership role with OpenSource.com since its beginning.

The last article the website published was on May 3, 2023, an article containing tips on how to run virtual or hybrid events. The only other thing the site’s published since was a notice published under the OpenSource.com byline called, New Developments at Opensource.com.

That article, after going through a bit of a strange explanation of top level domains, and how .com was originally intended for commercial entities and .org for non-profit websites, made a vague promise:

“The website Opensource.com has been supported by a commercial entity for 12 years. But the people (that’s you and me) that make up the Opensource.com community aren’t commercial entities, we’re people.

In one month, Opensource.com is going to resolve that bug. Stay tuned!”

Over a year later we’re still waiting for that “bug” (that doesn’t really exist) to be resolved.

I say “doesn’t really exist” because these days there are plenty of .com websites that aren’t connected to commercial entities.

We Love Open Source

In the video ATO put out that sorta announced We Love Open Source after its soft launch several months earlier, there’s a wink-wink, nudge-nuge moment when Hibbets obliquely comments on his previous involvement with OpenSource.com. The reference happens at about the three minute mark, when Lewis asks about Hibbet’s plans for the future of the project, or if he has “any thoughts about what this looks like going forward?”

Hibbets answered with, “Well Todd, you know I have a little bit of experience doing this, and…”

“I’ve heard you do,” Lewis interrupted with a nod.

“The biggest thing is growth,” Hibbets continued. “We’re looking to publish as much as we can, on a regular basis. We are looking to expand the topics. I’d like to get to a point where we have a writer community that we can have more than a one-way conversation with.”

The project already has a running start in developing a stable of writers, since many of the people who regularly contributed to OpenSource.com are already regular contributors to We Love Open Source. Open source advocate Don Watkins is on board as a regular writer (he’s contributed five article so far in October alone), as is Jim Hall, founder and project coordinator of the FreeDOS Project.

Other well-known open sourcers who have so far contributed to the website include Jim Salter, who wrote for Ars Technica for a couple of years and who frequently speaks at conferences; Luis Villa, co-founder and general counsel at Tidelift; and Dave Stokes, who’s currently a technology evangelist at Percona after spending more than 11 years as the MySQL Community Manager at Oracle.