From democratizing code to democratizing content

By 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. The author is the Editor of PC Quest.)





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