From democratizing code to democratizing content

Krishna Kumar

NASHVILLE, (Tennessee): The second Red

Hat summit kicked off on Wednesday in the music city of the United States

with the announcement three new initiatives, two of them aimed at what CEO

Matthew Szulik called the democratization of content.

Set in salubrious surroundings at the Gaylord Opryland resort, a 6.5 acre

property with its own jungles, island and boating -- all within the complex, the

summit has drawn more than a thousand attendees in its second year.

The first of these initiatives is 108 or rather the website 108.redhat.com.

108 is an online developer community designed as a site to collaborate and

collate resources. The name 108 comes from its Wikipedia reference, complete

with mystic references. With 108, Red Hat launches a developer community

program.

The second one is mugshot, at www.mugshot.org. Mugshot,

according to Red Hat, is the “open source model applied to non-developer

contexts”. Mugshot is a cross-platform community portal aimed at the youth

market with three focus areas — Linkswarm, Music Radar and TV Party. Linkswarm

is a technology whereby a user can send information about interesting web pages

to his friends, thereby creating a swarm of visitors to that URL.

Similarly, Music Radar is about sharing tastes and information about music,

including information about what is currently playing on ones system.

With these, Red Hat joins a growing set of companies making a play in the

community content space. While 108 is on familiar territory, rallying developers

— something that the open source company has been good it, mugshot is

venturing into new territory, one that is more associated with the likes of Yahoo,

Google,

flickr and Myspaces. Red Hat states that they are not competing with these

companies, but works in conjunction with their offerings. Music Radar for

example, draws on the playlists of iTunes or Yahoo Music Player.

A third initiative aimed more squarely at developers and Enterprise customers

was also announced. This one is an automatic testing harness- a set of scripts

and test scenarios for software testing and follows up on Dogtail, a GUI test

tool and automation framework written in Python.

(Red Hat hosted the author at the summit)

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