Red Hat's new chief executive Jim Whitehurst has admitted his company needs to improve its approach to its customers and partners.

Yesterday afternoon, Red Hat, Inc. announced that James Whitehurst would be taking over for Matthew Szulik as chief executive. This is important open source news because Red Hat is by far the largest company practicing open source as its primary business. (Disclaimer: I am a Red Hat executive.)

Red Hat can't match Microsoft or Oracle's marketing budgets, but the open source paradigm gives it an advantage in the long term, chief executive Jim Whitehurst told eWEEK Europe.

Jim Whitehurst, chief executive officer of Raleigh-based Red Hat, is one of the speakers at the eighth annual Fuqua School of Business and Coach K Leadership Conference this week in Durham. Whitehurst recently talked with Kate Catlin of MMI Public Relations about Red Hat.

It's been exactly a year since former Delta Airlines vice president turned Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst criticized open-source vendors for doing a lousy job of getting customers involved in the community and projects. Twelve months on, how are things looking?

When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company's new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst's chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.

The challenges to government's adoption and participation in open-source communities is often thought to be a simpe culture clash, but in reality it goes deeper than that, accordning to NASA's newly-appointed chief technology officer.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently appointed Jeff Jaffe as their new Chief Executive Officer. Jeff had most recently worked as Chief Technology Officer at Novell. W3C is an international community that sets standards for the web. Its work has had significant positive impact, and has helped free the web from proprietary standards.

Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu version of Linux, called Tuesday's interest-rate cut the "most extraordinary failure of economic leadership in recent years."