Christopher Blizzard

I taste confusion. Misunderstanding. Cats and dogs living together. Mass panic.

Bryan and Havoc both posted about Mugshot. But they talked a lot about the what and not so much about the why. Havoc touched on this during the speech that he gave during the opening keynote, but I haven’t seen it really reflected anywhere in posts or documents, so I thought I might take a stab at it. (The videos from the keynote are rumoured to be up next week, but I think that getting this out there before then is important.)

First, a caveat. I’m not on the mugshot team. However, I have had the chance to interact with Bryan and Havoc and spend time talking about the ideas and the rationale behind it. So I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. It’s my hope that I can put a little context on Mugshot.

Most people seem to be asking “Wait, is this Red Hat? What are they doing, getting into this space? Aren’t they an enterprise company? What about the Linux Desktop? This doesn’t make any sense at all!” We’ve been accused of getting into the “social networking”, “web 2.0″, “competing with myspace” and all sorts of nonsense. I guess I can understand that. People want to frame their discussions in what they know and it’s easy to try and pigeonhole what we’re doing as “just the same as what someone else is doing” but that’s not the case.

Let’s take a long step back and talk about Red Hat for a moment. What do you think we stand for as a company? What do we think about? What drives us forward? Servicing enterprises? Linux? A great logo? Something else? As a company we’ve done a huge amount of soul searching on the topic. And two of the main themes that seem to permeate everything we do cross along two axes: freedom and collaboration.

Examples? We care about free software. Not just “you can get the source code” but “free as in freedom.” Yes, I might sound a little nutty, but we do actually care about these things. And we’ve learned to work with our customers in the same way we deal with the free software community. Transparancy, honesty, and with a strong commitment to making them successful. Freely exchaging ideas and experience. Working as partners. That’s collaboration.

Keep those ideas in mind for a moment.

Think about how many people use computers in the world. We know that there are millions of people who don’t use computers to run their businesses. Our friends. Our families. They use computers differently. They use them for fun. To play games, to chat with their friends, share photos with their family. For entertainment.

Our current model of Linux-for-the business works great. It makes a lot of money for us, and our shareholders. But there’s a vast number of people for whom it’s unlikely that we’ll reach through that mechanism. They care about different things. So what would happen if we, as Red Hat, decided to reach out to them? What would that look like? Remember what we care about. We care about working with others and we think that everyone should have a chance to enjoy the freedom that we do.

We know that just doing a better Linux isn’t enough. Asking my mom to give up everything that she uses might make me feel good (and maybe her, given some of her experiences with Windows) but maybe it’s not the best for her. And who says that Linux is the only possible expression of those values? Or the fastest or with the highest impact?

This is the roundabout way of explaining why Mugshot exists. It’s a project. An expriment and a chance to learn. Dabbling in new waters. A chance to really change the way that people use the web and interact with each other and make things a little bit more fun. And at the same time giving others the chance to experience the values that we live every day.