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'MugShot' Premiers -- It's Red Hat's Open Source Counter to MySpace Phenomenon and More, Hatters Say

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Red Hat wowed a lot of people at its Summit this week in Nashville when it unveiled Mugshot (mugshot.org ).

The Red Hatters want to take the open source community - and others - beyond the social experience of the Internet that has been captured in many ways by the wildly popular MySpace. (Rupert Murdoch spent a whopping $580 million to buy it.)

In many ways, Mugshot is a throwback to the early days of Red Hat when the Linux software developer led by Bob Young was an extremely social place to work built around the collaborative principles of open source and Linux. In the days ahead of IPOs and Wall Street quarterly revenue pressure, Red Hat was innovative, trendsetting and fun. Now, it's -- well, innovative, profitable, trendsetting and much more Street.

That businesslike image is just one of the reasons why Mugshot came as such a surprise.

Jack Schofield, writing for the UK Guardian, exclaimed: "Red Hat has launched a mould-breaking open source thingy called Mugshot, which includes link swarming (join a bandwagon or participate in a 'herd effect'!) and music radar (let other people know what you are listening to!). Most exciting of all, will help geeks to get together and have parties based on watching TV: a whole world of Lost, Desperate Housewives and re-runs of Friends beckons. (Well, let's not go mad: it may be enough just to have online chats while watching television.)"

Antone Gonsalves, writing at TechWeb.com, contrasted Mugshot with Enterprise Linux running servers on some of the world's largest corporate networks:

"Red Hat Inc. has veered from its usual offering of corporate-ready Linux with the launch of an open-source project that lets users share music and other entertainment-related content through online social networks, blogs and Web sites.

"Mugshot, unveiled Wednesday, places Red Hat in an Internet world favored by teenagers and young adults on sites like MySpace, rather than the company's usual haunts of corporate IT."

DevX News described Mugshot as "much like a social networking effort you wouldn't expect to see from a serious enterprise vendor".

Hold on a minute, said Red Hat as a collective entity.

It's much more than a social networking site, according to the company. Plus, it's not just a frivolous money spend.

The Hatters describe Mugshot as an "open" project that is designed to "create a live social experience around entertainment". (Havoc Pennington, one of the developers, noted that Red Hat doesn't use the words "social networking.") The first released version of the site reflects that mission. Mugshot currently offers "Link Swarm" to link individuals and groups in real time as well as "Music Radar" for users to "show off" the music they are listening to. Still to come is TV Party.

In a FAQ, Red Hat pointed out Mugshot is intended to be built upon by open source developers. Right now, Red Hat has some seven people working on the project.

Key points as Red Hat stressed in the FAQ are:

Reaction to Mugshot was not universally positive, however. Comments in blogs and elsewhere led Christopher Blizzard, manager of Red Hat's desktop group and an active blogger himself, to defend the project.

"I taste confusion. Misunderstanding. Cats and dogs living together. Mass panic," he blogged from the Summit. Pointing out that he's not part of the Mugshot team, Blizzard went on to stress that Red Hat is sticking to its roots of open source, which relies on collaboration.

"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!'," Blizzard wrote. "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."

Blizzard noted that Red Hat's corporate Linux makes money and that Mugshot is a way to reach out to computer users who might not ever experience Linux. How would they react? How would they use a site built on open source? And what could Red Hat learn from those users? "It's a project. An expriment and a chance to learn. Dabbling in new waters," Blizzard said. "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."

Maybe Red Hat hasn't changed that much after all -- despite the suits.

For Blizzard,'s complete blog on the subject, see: www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=204

For more information on Mugshot and the Red Hat Summit in general, see: www.redhat.com/promo/summit/

For the FAQ on Mugshot, see: mugshot.org/faq