From airlines to open source software, Red Hat’s global CEO Jim Whitehurst has made a smooth transition. Mr Whitehurst, who was the chief operating officer(COO) of Delta Airlines in his earlier stint, and helped the bankrupt airline return to profits, is now at the helm of open source software vendor Red Hat, which competes with firms several times its size such as Microsoft and Oracle.

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.

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader.

In an eWEEK interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company is "defining a whole new business model" by applying collaborative principles similar to those behind Facebook and Wikipedia. Whitehurst speaks out on open source business models, RHEL 5.4's KVM hypervisor, and the cloud.

Red Hat's newly appointed chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has two masters to serve: Wall Street, and the open-source community. Failure to keep either happy will have its consequences, both damaging to his business.

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.)

CEO Jim Whitehurst says Red Hat will perform robustly through a recession. Is that true or is he engaged in wishful thinking? InformationWeek's cover story this week, "The Open Source Enterprise," concludes that open source code gets taken more seriously in a time of IT budget cutbacks. Will that help Red Hat?

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?