I am, quite possibly, the most anti-social person on this planet. This makes it all the more surprising that I bumped into Rick Statile, counsel for Red Hat, while in line at Passport Control at London's Gatwick Airport on Sunday. Rick and his wife, Lara, are in London on vacation, heading out on what sounds like an amazing cruise later this week. We almost missed each other, as I was buried in my Blackberry for I am, quite possibly, the most anti-social person on this planet. This makes it all the more surprising that I bumped into Rick Statile, counsel for Red Hat, while in line at Passport Control at London’s Gatwick Airport on Sunday. Rick and his wife, Lara, are in London on vacation, heading out on what sounds like an amazing cruise later this week.We almost missed each other, as I was buried in my Blackberry for most of the wait in line. The reason wasn’t email, but rather an attempt on my part to avoid having to talk to someone from my law school who was ahead of me in line. (I told you I’m anti-social.) I hardly knew him in law school and figured the forced pleasantries weren’t in his interest or mine if our eyes met in line, so I kept staring at my Blackberry to avoid having to be social. Fortunately, I looked up once for air, and Rick said ‘Hi.” We had lunch together last month at Red Hat Summit, and so it was great to see him. In fact, bucking my anti-social ways, I invited Lara and Rick to join me for dinner in London. I’m not a good substitute for a real vacation, but they were without their bags (and had been for 24 hours – airline snafus had left them desolate of clean clothes, but it only seemed to affect Rick negatively :-). I guess in that situation even I seemed like an acceptable way to pass the time. We ate at Tamarind, my favorite London restaurant (where I’ve dined with Nick McGrath, head of Microsoft’s Windows strategy team, and more recently with Mark Shuttleworth, who was on the BBC this weekend). In the course of our conversation (90% of which was thankfully not about open source, which might have driven Lara insane) Rick mentioned something that I hadn’t considered:What happens once you’ve hired all the open source advocates?In other words, where does Red Hat turn once it has tapped out the market for uber-savvy, pro-open source people? It creates new ones, of course, but arguably this makes its next five years of growth more difficult and, I’d say, more interesting than its first five to ten. Red Hat has to be in the evangelism business, to some extent, both external and now internal. New hires will mostly be looking for a job. Just a job. They won’t understand Red Hat’s place in the software market, and how it is helping to redefine the rules of that market.From my own experience with Alfresco, I know that this isn’t a major problem. Almost everyone who works for Alfresco comes from a proprietary software background, though we have a sprinkling of JBoss and Novell people. We therefore look for people who are malleable; frankly, I look for people young enough in the industry that they can learn the new rules of software, as dictated by open source.I suspect it will be the same for Red Hat. It will continue to pull from disaffected members of the old guard software industry, but will likely draw most of its new hires from the untainted masses of newbies to the software industry. Think about that. People growing up in open source, learning the new rules from Day One. As more people enter the industry this way, I suspect we will see some fundamental shifts in thinking about what software means, and how the market defines value. The platitudes of today will disintegrate and become the heresies of tomorrow (while the heresies of today are already becoming the platitudes of tomorrow – “open” has become mainstream while “closed” is now on the defensive).Exciting times ahead of us. Open Source