Bob Young is a self-confessed contrarian with a strong desire to change the world by allowing people to share and collaborate. The approach has served him well and has helped turn the Canadian into a multi-millionaire.
From the outset, his software company Red Hat bucked the trend set by the big players like Microsoft which stubbornly guarded every line of code and charged whopping fees to maintain it.
Red Hat’s approach was unusual at the time and relied on free software developed by an open-source community. Customers were given the right to change the code any way they liked and Red Hat sold services to make sure it all worked.
In those early 1990s, many businesses feared that open source would not be stable and often opted for the proprietary model being sold by the likes of Microsoft. Today, the Redmond giant has seen its market share erode; Red Hat has become the world’s open-source leader. Click here to read more.
