Why do I get the feeling that Red Hat is a software company run by software engineers?
It's hard for me to shake off the distinction between companies run by business/product-goons whipping their engineers into submission to produce code that they can sell and companies run by engineers themselves. Wether or not the CEO codes is irrelevant, but the fact that it's entirely engineer driven.
It seems to me that key management in Red Hat come from Digital/DEC, and have the same engineer-led ethos that Digital had (before it was acquired by Compaq).
Edit: Also Red Hat is somewhat cult-like (I say that in a good way). Open source, "upstream first", etc are taken very seriously.
It's hard for me to shake off the distinction between companies run by business/product-goons whipping their engineers into submission to produce code that they can sell and companies run by engineers themselves. Wether or not the CEO codes is irrelevant, but the fact that it's entirely engineer driven.