We are pleased to announce that Bob Young will be one of our keynote speakers for FSOSS this year!

Bob Young

Red Hat, Inc. Co-Founder

Bob Young’s has his roots right here in Canada, where he graduated from the University of Toronto in 1976 prior to beginning his career in the computer finance arena.

In 1993, Young co-founded Red Hat Inc., an open-source software company whose primary revenue stream comes from subscriptions, training, and support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat Inc. is a Fortune 500 company, a world leader in open source software providing, and chief rival to Microsoft.

On Feb 29, 2014, Red Hat marked a major milestone by becoming the first billion-dollar-a-year company making its revenue almost entirely from building and maintaining open source software.
His success at Red Hat won him industry-wide recognition, including a nomination as one of Business Week's "Top Entrepreneurs".

Before founding Red Hat, Young spent 20 years at the helm of two computer-leasing companies that he founded. His experiences as a high tech entrepreneur combined with his innate marketing savvy led to Red Hat's incredible success. His book, "Under the Radar", chronicles how Red Hat's open source strategy successfully won acceptance in a market previously dominated by proprietary systems.

In 2000, Young co-founded the Center for Public Domain, a not-for-profit foundation created to bolster healthy conversation of intellectual property, patent and copyright law, and the management of the public domain for the common good. Grant recipients included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Future of Music Coalition.

Bob also founded Lulu.com in 2002. The premiere international marketplace for online book-publishing contains over 300,000 published titles with more than 15,000 new creators from 80 countries joining each week. More recently in 2013, he embarked on his latest venture and launched picture.com, a website dedicated to the publishing of photo books.

Proving that his finance expertise extends far beyond the realm of technology, in 2003, Young purchased the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League and currently serves as the league's vice chairman.

This open source pioneer who enjoys fly fishing and collects calculators and antique typewriters, continues to show the world that he knows open source....and he certainly knows innovation!