Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software

Matt Asay | ReadWrite | August 13, 2013

While most companies fight copycats, Red Hat embraces its top clone, CentOS. Here's how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware.

Imagine your company spent more than $100 million developing a product. Now imagine that a competitor came along and cloned your product and distributed a near-perfect replica of it. Not good, right? If you're Apple, you spend years and tens of millions of dollars fighting it, determined to be the one and only source of your product.

If you're Red Hat, however, you embrace it—as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told ReadWrite in an interview.