The commercial software industry is failing enterprise customers through overpricing, lengthy development cycles, and products with bloated feature sets that most customers don't use, said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who spoke Wednesday during a keynote presentation at the Interop IT Conference and Expo in New York City.

"It's the vendors," said Whitehurst. "There's been no change in productivity in thirty years," he said, noting that commercial software products typically suffer from the same bug rates as they did three decades ago. "The business model is broken," said Whitehurst.

The main problem, according to Whitehurst, is a commercial development model under which executives, programmers, and marketers get together in an effort to predict what their customers want-and then take five years to build it. As a result, "half of all IT projects fail," said Whitehurst.

Not surprisingly, given his position atop a major Linux distributor, Whitehurst said open source development models offer fixes for many of the ills that plague commercial software. Most significantly, open source allows customers to participate in the product development cycle.

"All I need to worry about is whether our architecture participants include Google, Yahoo, and Amazon," said Whitehurst, referring to some of Red Hat's biggest customers. "Our solutions aren't based on our ideas about what you want. Our customers are building them," he said.