Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat In Business News
jferg was one of the first people to write about
the coverage in today's Observer in regards to the latest business happenings at Red Hat. The article touches on the launch of RH Advanced Server, but one of the most telling statistics was "Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."
I guess it would make an easier move for a corporation to go from Unix to Linux, but imho Linux's real threat is MS/Unisys, not Unix.
Guess I'm just another anti M$ shashdotter though.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
So does Red Hat have the way out or the way in?
Do you think that the sliding sales, not only in Redhat but others as well, could be due to these factors: 1) An increase in broadband over the last couple of years by home users. 2) The popularity of ISO's days after a new release. Instead of going to the store to buy a distribution, I can sit on my ass at home and download three ISO's, burn em to CD, and have everything except documentation. Mandrake has the right idea IMO, with their users club or whatever they call it..Reaping profits through other means.
Don't forget the development is done by millions of unpaid volunteers.
0xB
that means that less than 10% of the company are developers. Quite a topsy-turvy situation for a software company.
I'm no mathematician, but shouldn't 100% of your employees be making efforts to get the software sold (be it in marketing, coding good products, etc)?
Where are the other 10% of the guys, on nap duty?
------
Today's Top Deals
So what is counted as Unix? Solaris and ____...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Millions? Did you say millions?
Sourceforge itself has just under 400,000 registered users.
No data, no cry
Lets look at it this way. They've got the big name companies saying that they're using RH. However as the article states, they didn't pay for a copy of RH for every server. They may buy a couple of licenses and then get the ppl at RH to provide some service.
They need to expand their business, and the way to do that is to go out and let people know who you are and what you can provide them. We have seen from the article that the software itself isn't sustaining them. They need to get the services division up and running and racking more money.
We've all joked about MS having a huge marketing dept and how their product sucked. Now look at RH, their product doesn't really suck, lol barring the RH Linux sucks comments. So if they put the same marketing force out there they might be able to increase their revenues.
I say it might turn out to be one of the best things they've done...or it may bomb and send them back to the drawing board. But either way, it's a start.
(Not a red hat employee)
It may just be that building large publicly traded coporations is not the way to go with open source software.
I'm no economist but I see no reason why this should be a terrible thing.
Personally I don't care how corporations fare. I care how individuals fare.
If individuals can succeed, without a corporation then I think that is better anyway. Large organizations tend to carry along overcompensated freeloaders. (Read CEO, CFO, etc.)
I would like to see an economy where individuals are compensated on their merits.
Like I said, I'm no economist and I don't have all the answers but I don't understand why I see articles that intimate that Open Source may fail because it does not work with the old business model.
In my eyes it is the old business model that is failing and a new one needs to be found.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
further, if these people not only advertise but provide Solutions for these companies that means dosh in the bank. Providing solutions makes linux companies money, yes they do package and sell the software, and frankly can charge whatever they want for it, (before flaming me, please take the time and the intelligence to read the GPL, I know you're all capable of it) but in the end corporate linux solutions are what put companies in the black, and keep them there.
and frankly corporate linux solutions, or lack thereof is what's putting other distributions, particularly the french one, out of business.
a bit more about me http://www.advogato.org/person/trelane/ or my private page http://trelane.net
But does this actually lend some amount of truth to Microsofts stance that Linux is only really gaining the marketshare that is being lost by proprietary Unix systems? If RedHat is concentrating on stealing commercial Unix accounts, rather than getting either new businesses or MS shops, it would appear so.
This isn't bad. Commercial Unix is the easiest target for RedHat, it's far easier to convince someone to drop AIX off their 390 and replace it with RedHat than it would be to convince them to ditch Windows on 5e10 little servers. Especially in a "Microsoft Shop" type culture, which is unfortunately where I spend a lot of my time.
My belief is that RedHat has as much chance of success as the next company, and if they need to steal business from Sun, Compaq, HP, IBM to do it, so much the better. At least the customer can still get their hardware from the hardware co's and get their software from RH, best of both worlds.
I like music
Of course "UNIX" (whatever that is, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD?) is an easier target than Windows. Still I think it is wrong to focus on the 'easy' targets; in the end it does not help Linux (including Redhat) if UNIX as a whole (including Linux) looses marketshare. The outside (Windows) is what we must gain from.
An internal healthy competition in the Unix camp is not necessarily bad, but if the UNIX camp is primarily focussing on getting each other, all will die soon. The only long term hope for survival is to withstand or push back the outside (non-unix).
I spent half the article waiting for the writer to provide some facts, but by the end, there still weren't any.
She says:
Does this mean RedHat is moving all their employees to the marketing department? Does it mean everybody is told to make 9 cold calls a day? All we're given is the typical investor information, share price, projections, etc., but little information about how the business plan is working or changing.
Frankly, the few real facts that are provided show a mixed bag, hardly worthy of the article's pessimistic title. Yet another Linux story trying to make news rather than report it.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Isn't that just the regular distro without all the man pages and howtos?
As the article points out, it's hard to make money selling a free product. IBM is likely to succeed with Linux because they can sell the hardware, non-free software, and (most importantly) the services associated with it. Red Hat might do best if it joined the HP-Compaq family, which might be the best candidate to challenge IBM on the Linux front (especially with Oracle as a partner).
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
The paper is News & Observer, or N&O (also of nando.net fame), not Observer. Small point, really.
One of the many derisions: News & Disturber.
At the high-end it is likely that linux is not feature competitive, but at the low and mid-range, RedHat can effectively market.
If they were to get a hold of Openmail, they really might be able to slash MS right out of the server space - as long as they could keep MS from messing with the protocols.
AFAIK, Exchange is the number one reason to have MS anywhere near the datacenter.
"Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."
:)
Eventually, this was going to happen. Sure, using 90% of the employees is kinda harsh, but IMHO RedHat's going to have to push at the big iron if they plan on making any sort of success. MS and everyone else is banging on the doors of big server farms already.
Maybe they could hire Brian Valentine to give their sales staff a boost and some spin-doctoring. Just imagine him being a Linux advocate.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Alan Cox should be doing whatever he feels like doing (as long as it's linux). Hopefully Red Hat management has the Tao, in which case he'll want to do things that will profit them.
--Charlie
We bought some copies of RedHat because we needed the support.
We recently switched all of our hosting equipment from M$ to RehHat (thanks largely to yours truly and the M$ machines' continued insistance on crash-and-burn computing).
The problem for RedHat is that I can get more and better support from #linuxhelp (take your choice of IRC undernets), Linuxdoc or just about anywhere else than I can from some guy at the corporation. I know the OS, and it doesn't take much time to find answers to stuff I don't know.
When I start trying to do undocumented stuff or I start having bizarro problems with the JVM, shared libraries or something else then the RH support guys don't know as much about the problem as I do.
I want to go to people who write the kernel, the libraries, the product or whatever isn't working and ask them. Online. For free.
I think the comments about going to a "club" style support system makes a hell of a lot more sense.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Totonic is right. Mandrake has a *great* idea. This is a bandwagon RedHat should jump on immediately. I would definitely join the Redhat club in a heartbeat.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Exactly.
I'll take it one step further. Large corporations are not the way to go with the Internet in general.
The Internet is a naturally decentralizing force. At the protocol level, it's amazingly decentralized, by design. The tendency is for anything it touches to be decentralized.
Consider software. Open source is the ultimate in decentralized software. Could Open Source exist in anything approaching its current scope if there were no Internet? To be blunt, it couldn't. Look at the progress of the GNU project in 1993, the midpoint of its life to date. This was also just before the great explosion in the 'net.
Consider media. Ten years ago, the average home in the US got, what, 30 channels of TV, plus a newspaper and a few magazines. Now, there are thousands of websites, each offering a different focus and a different point of view.
Consider entertainment. Ten years ago, if you wanted to distribute music on any sort of scale, you had to go to the RIAA or to an indie label that was limited in its reach. If you wanted to have your writing published, you had to go to a publisher of some sort, or pay exorbitant fees to a vanity press. And let's not get started on motion pictures. Now the Internet is allowing real distribution of entertainment media at huge savings (especially when P2P is taken into account).
As the Internet becomes more interwoven into business, business will decentralize. As business decentralizes, wealth and power will decentralize.
In short, it was the great fallacy of the 1990's that you could become rich thanks to the Internet, the dominant effect of which, ultimately, is decentralization.
- because it's still not ready for production use.
The pppd has been *known* to be broken since October 2001, but no errata has been pushed out yet, despite a chorus of complaints, emails, slashdot discussions, etc. You can't dial in with a mac or a win9x box - that's a *major* bug! The wtmp functionality is broken too - you can't see PPP users with a "w" command.
I paid for 5.0, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 - and I convinced others to pay also - but I'm not going to pay for 7.2 until the pppd gets fixed. What other leverage do I have, but my dollars, since complaining has done no good?
Quality product sells. Broken product gets downloaded for testing and then chucked out.
--Charlie
been reading "the hacker ethic" lately? ;^)
seriously, i see your point. these things take time though. revolutions are never good for business (read "for making money"). but that's IMHO of course
10% of 630 people=63. not a bad number of developers for a product that is essentially completed
It's refreshing to see RedHat put away the Linux vs. Microsoft philospohy that so much of the Slashdot community favors, and focus on building their market share through UNIX conversion.
Extrapolating from this, they look like they're building a solidified UNIX market share, allowing them to eventually focus on the desktop and small server shops where Microsoft truly thrives
Today UNIX, Tomorrow the World! Muhahahah
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's excellent, both for Red Hat's continued success, and the greater acceptance of Open Source / Free Software. As geeks we like to think that the best technology will prevail, but in truth it's all about your marketing and salesmanship. I'd like to think that TrustCommerce is experience so much success due to the cool technologies that we have developed, but I know that it's really our sales staff that brings in the green. (In fact, we have a ratio around 90% of sales to other staff as well...)
Good for Red Hat. I hope that they can pull through this recession intact; and I think they will, because they seem to understand the basic premises of business.
It may just be that building large publicly traded coporations is not the way to go with open source software.
I think that's true of most or all services companies, open source or not. You can make a ton of money with services, but there's no way that you can produce 50-100% growth every year, which is what the stock market expects out of a startup. Even giganto services companies like the Big 5 accounting firms are privately held.
Problem is that RedHat sorta sold themselves as a software company. But they ain't - no R&D, no IP, no exponential growth prospects. Microsoft stuck that in their eye during the anti-trust trial - they've lost nothing relative to MS because they've produced nothing.
I like RedHat I use RedHat , I made a bundle early with RHAT stock.
Ive been watching the RHAT stock for the last month VERY close waiting to buy at 4.75 (A mark I set, arbitrary at best)
Rhat has AS(advanced Serve) Is it out of beta ?, and 7.? In beta , its the first beta Ive seen with a Beta2 revision from redhat in....well ever....
People are saying nothing but good things about RedHat from a business and finacial standpoint and yet still the stock slides. 7 is a fair value if I can buy at under 5 , rich I tell you Rich Ill be, ok so a little overenthusiasm on my part.
But why in gods name, does the stock continue to slide ? Ideas anyone ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
The problem with your argument is that certain software problems require a massive investment and that requires centralized resources or planning.
.NET could never be developed and planned in an ad-hoc manner, even though they might end up enabling a decentralized business model.
Think of things like RDBMS systems, where the decentralized attempts are 20 years behind the commercial versions. Even software systems designed to work with the 'internet model', like Java or
Being a student at NCSU, home to RedHat's new corporate offices, I had the privelege yesterday of sitting in on a presentation by Matthew Szulik, CEO of RedHat. Though his presentation was on entreprenuership in NC, the talk quickly diverged into discussions of Open Source and how in the heck they plan on making money. I took the following things away from the lecture:
1) Szulik is a decent guy. His message of measuring entrepreneurial success in social terms instead of the quarterly shareholder statement was quite refreshing. He honestly seems to embrace the ideals of Open Source.
2) He stated during the lecture that despite having spent less than $1 million on advertising, RedHat is the 12th most recognized brand name in technology. Though the N&O article may suggest that 90% of their staff is in marketing, it probably suggests instead that they are simply working at making RedHat a better replacement for Unix (this takes marketing AND coders).
3) A number of skeptical members of the audience asked how they would ever make money. There were two answers: subscriptions and services. IBM is the best example of the tremendous market value of services, however Matthew spent more time on the subscription side. Let's be honest. Your average sysadmin doesn't want to have to deal with package management and keeping a system up-to-date. The RHN is a step in the right direction for managing the herculean task... it worked for me. I paid them $60 for a priority membership and I'm most pleased with it.
With Unisys and Microsoft supporting an Anti-Unix campaign, on the basis of Unix being overall more expensive than Windows. Wouldn't this just help Linux? While they spend the money convincing corporations that Unix is to expensive, Linux could ride the wave. Convince customers there product is cheaper than Windows, and no retraining of Unix personnel needed (for the most part.) Not to mention from where I sit (Telecom), it would be a whole lot easier to port existing applications to Linux, than to Windows.
Awesome!
One year from now Sun Microsystems will be the largest distributor of Linux systems. Not because they will have converted from Solaris to Linux, but because by offering their own hardware and Linux version they will provide enterprises the proverbial "one neck to choke". If they are really on the ball they will give their Linux a Solaris flavor and make administering Solaris and Sun Linux systems as similar as they can. All the telcos and hosting companies currently running Solaris will be able to migrate leisurely to Sun Linux without disrupting their current business relationships. Why would I buy support from IBM/Compaq/HP/Dell for hardware and support from Red Hat/SuSE/Mandrake for software when I can get both from Sun? Sun can then continue concentrating Solaris at the midrange and high-end. Red Hat is dangerously close to being the skinny man of the tech industry: a stiff breeze may blow them away.
RedHat's staff :
90% marketing
09% coding
01% managing
You can make fun all you want. But I think that's the way to go.
90 percent of hatters are not marketing people. I don't know where the article got that statistic, and would be quite interested in knowing.
Most of Red Hat's revenue does not come from selling the box set, but from other sources; check out their last quarterly report . Not that the company doesn't make money on people buying the box, but that's not the companies largest revenue stream. Red Hat is a service company and it makes sense, stratigically, to target enterprise customers; they have very deep pockets and are willing to pay for an all encompassing solution, including services like consulting and support. Unlike you and me, aka the cheap bastards!! Well, I don't know about you, but I'm definitely one. Pay for software, you must be mad! Sorry little rant.
As for the fact that Red Hat is targeting a Uni* to Linux migration. Well, some people will disagree with me, but Linux, even with all it's graphical user stuff, is not ready for my Grandmother to use. It's getting there, but I don't think it's there yet. So if a large chunk of the population is unable or uninterested in your software, who do you sell it to? Is it reasonable to think that the people who would be interested in Linux are people who are already interested and are using Uni*? The two are very similar and it's far easier for an administrator or developer who is familiar with Uni* to switch to Linux rather than one who is used to Window$. Corporations have been employing Uni* for quite some time and have been paying people like $un a hefty price for hardware, OS, and support. In the current economic climate, I think it's a great strategy for a company to move to a lower cost IT solution. Why shouldn't Red Hat be the people to turn to? I say kudos Red Hat!
-Runz
Didn't anyone tell you that there is no such thing as the "new economy"? The old economy IS the economy. There's nothing wrong with it. We DO live in a meritocracy. Its just that you cannot simply expect people to do well based on their own hard work in every situation. Inside a corporation or ANY organization, even the non-profit ones you must excell at politics. This includes when working with customers/citizens/partners/vendors.....etc. Just because you suddenly decide you don't want to work with the "system" doesn't mean the world is going to agree and come join you. While you're working in your organization (Debian like perhaps?) everyone else will continue to offer products from companies with marketing budgets and slick salesmen/executives. And you know what?
There's nothing wrong with that.
They're working just as hard as anyone else, to do what they do. You do what you do, and the CEO's and CFO's will do what they do. Thats how it works. Its just the way it is that some people because of their positions or some organizations because of their position, power and wealth (i.e. corporations) get more attention than others. Thats how it is with anything in life.
I know you began with a disclaimer of "I am not an economist" but did you even TRY to think before you posted this comment? Without a company how will open source developers get paid? And without a publicly traded company where will such an organization get the seed funding it will need in its first 5 to perhaps 10 unprofitable years of operation? Cause if you think you don't need money to make a difference or have an effect in this industry then you're insane. Sure you can merely "exist" and "survive" as the Debian org has over the years, but they aren't the guys leading the way, making new standards and making news. And before you even ask, YES DAMMIT those things are important. If you are not doing those things for your product, or class of software than the companies with all the power/money/marketing will simply move on, come up with something new and offer it to the public leaving you behind and soon to be forgotten. Pretty much like GNU/Hurd, OpenBSD, and other still existant but now largely irrelvant projects. They might still be around but none of the important players in the tech industry, MS, IBM, Sun, HP....etc give a rats ass about them anymore. I'd rather not see Linux reach the same fate (and it won't since there's more behind Linux than just Red Hat).
In any case the "We don't need corporate funding/attention to survive, as long as one sunlight deprived geek in a basement somewhere is still hacking on the project in Ohio it will always survive!!!!" attitude just really has to go. Its really not doing anyone any good.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
He's right. Redhat is well known for releases that have lots of problems - if you disagree, just look at the updates directory at your favorite release site.
Instead of pushing 90% of their company to sell sell sell, maybe they should push 80% and let the other 10% work on fixing holes.
Code Monkey: "Hello, I am calling to speak to you about the infinite possibilities Red Hat Linux offers your company."
IT Manager: "Oh? What are they?"
Code Monkey: "RTFM!"
*click*
A) I don't have a broadband connection.
;) without all the books.
B) I do like some of the proprietary software that can only come in the boxed version.
C) I like supporting both the OSS movement, and the companies that support it.
I do wish, however, that I could buy my favorite distro in just the CD's (and 1 DVD
Books have to be one of the costlier aspects of the distro. They do write good books, but as often as I buy distro's, I don't need the newer versions. Maybe offer something on the website to just buy the CD's. I think leaving the books in the store selections is a good idea, so a beginner gets all the help (s)he needs, without having to decide if they want it, but have an option for experienced users to not have to waste the trees or money.
And yet what has it done for consumers? Relatively little.
Here again, you focus too much on the delivery protocol and ignore the surrounding facts. While the internet and technology may technically enable artists to remove the so-called middle-men from the actual act of transfering the music/data, it really doesn't make RIAA or its respective labels any less relevant. Their function is primarily one of marketing and capital/risk taking. Even if distribution changes radically (which I could well argue against), RIAA continues and will continue to dominate the industry.
Again, this is not terribly different than the PC OEMs. We have the emergence of MORE choices amongst major companies, that continue to retain some 95% of the market, and a bunch of little guys fighting over scraps. The technology may bring offering choices more into the cost effective region, but there's nothing to say the major media conglomerates will not dominate. The major companies enjoy many significant advantages over the little guys. In any event, there's no real significant decentralization happening here if you measure it as consumer mind/hour share or in dollar figures, just the emergence of increased choice.
Here again, I disagree. While I was no cheerleader of the DotComs, the fallacy of the internet WAS that you could get rich quick without really working for it and without having to generate any real value for society...it was thought of as more of an act of arbitrage than anything else. There is still money to be made by exploiting the benefits of the Internet, but it requires some sanity, risk taking, honest to god effort, and willingness to scrounge for capital and take on all the nay-sayers.
...then maybe there's a software company with the right perspective out there.
Nobody's gonna appreciate your wonderful genius ability to turn coffee into code & piss if you can't sell your wares. Maybe finally getting in touch with the millions of Americans who still have "12:00" flashing on their VCRs (you know... "IT managers") will be the path to success.
But then again, saying 90% of your workforce is in marketing is just the kind of jackass comment you'd expect from a marketing veep. Ugh.
Any company would be wise to stay as far away as possible from the HP-Compaq mess. HP has been losing ground in the Unix arena, not because Linux, but because IBM has been kicking their butts by offering better enterprise Unix systems and service. The only thing HP is doing well at is printers. The Compaq merger is a futile attempt to throw good money after bad trying to compete in the PC business. Any Linux company that gets involved with HP will be sucked right down the toilet with them.
I have seen this post several times before, always posted as AC.
Trolling?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
I turned a workhorse quad xeon running 7.0, into an unstable, error ridden mess, simply by upgrading to 7.2, so I could ext3. I totally lost the ability to see the adaptec 2940 in the unit,(panic) and it has "scores" of network errors, no matter what NIC's I swap in. Oddly, I have tried the hardware (40x6i DAT) in other boxes (non SMP) and they work fine. The 2.4.9 kernel is pretty much the disaster it's claimed to be, for me.
I've had the same experience with Redhat. The support they include with boxed software is a joke- I get better, faster help from Linux newsgroups. I don't have any experience with their premium support. It might be really good, but the basic stuff is so bad I'm not about to give it a try.
This is true. The essence of this business, especially "free" software, is support. This is what IBM does, and does so well they're kicking everyone's butts. Redhat has a long way to go to beat IBM. But if they keep at it they can be the IBM of 2015, if they don't screw up too much along th way.
I would like to see an economy where individuals are compensated on their merits.
And I'd like to see magic fairies fly out of my butt and sprinkle your donut with mystical pixie butt-dust.
You're another retarded, libertarian programmer without a clue how the universe operates - ripe for the picking!
I would like to see an economy where individuals are compensated on their merits.
And how does Open Source software compensate individual coders based on their merits? Seems to me that Open Source is geared towards not compensating *anybody*.
which doesn't typically boost investor confidence. In late March, Chief Executive Officer Matthew Szulik filed to sell 425,000 of his shares after filing to sell 600,000 shares in February, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Company co-founder and Chairman Robert F. Young has unloaded nearly 700,000 shares so far this year, part of a plan in which he sells shares automatically on a daily basis.
When the founders/owners/top execs of a company start dumping shares, that's not a good sign. These guys know how the company is really doing.
MS SQL Server and Sybase were one and the same until release 4.8. They share the same syntax and procedural-SQL extensions (Transact SQL).
Sybase is multi-platform, 64-bit capable, and very cheap (cheaper than MS, especially with the AS bundling). MS's only 64-bit port is to the Itanium, which is still a stranger to the datacenter. Tom Kyte of Oracle fame has criticisms for the Sybase/MS locking model, but the software is capable.
The Linux version of the Sybase 11.0.3.3 server is also available free of charge from linux.sybase.com - this is free for development and deployment. The Sybase 12 family is very inexpensive compared to Oracle and DB2.
The free 11.0.3.3 server was developed for Red Hat. It's SQL implementation is a bit dated (I don't even know if it is SQL92 entry-level-compliant, but a lot of SQL syntax from Postgres and MySQL doesn't work).
Why anybody uses MS SQL Server when a branch of the same code base is available for free boils down to one word: marketing.
A lot of the compensation for the creation of open source software itself is not as immediately tangible as the benefits of closed software. As in direct economic gain.
But I'm talking about things well outside of just open source and software. I'm talking about technology enabling people to have more control over their lives and the ability to see the benefits of their own work.
Some of this will be generated by propietary software that runs on open operating systems.
I'm getting all these hyper critical, emotional responses to a pretty simple post.
People (and I think usually of programmers since I am one) can start to think outside the box in terms of making a living.
I can stop putting in 60 hours a week so someone else can afford a third multi million dollar home. Someone who has put in much less effort and taken no risk.
Take the blinders off. Look around and start thinking that things can be better if you make an effort. Don't settle for the way it's always been.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
They'd have more success if they were selling
the more stable, technically superior, more
advanced FreeBSD.
...and start agressively migrating MS SQL Server to RedHat Advanced Server/Sybase. It's a perfect fit.
A lot of the compensation for the creation of open source software itself is not as immediately tangible as the benefits of closed software. As in direct economic gain.
But I'm talking about things well outside of just open source and software. I'm talking about technology enabling people to have more control over their lives and the ability to see the benefits of their own work.
So then how, EXACTLY, can someone be compensated for writing open source software? Are you suggesting compensation by a "warm fuzzy" feeling?
I think that it's a very basic, very simple question that I'm genuinely curious about. How does someone who writes open source software get compensated for their work and skill?
If you install linux which you acquired from a linux solutions provider & also purchase support, installing on hardware you already own, do you really save alot of money? What are the support & liscensing costs for Tru64 or AIX vs the same service costs for linux acquired from Compaq or IBM? I have a feeling that the difference isn't great however, the difference in liscensing any *nix vs. liscensing any M$ product is like night and day. Why isn't M$ the easier target?
If you use RedHat, particularly in a business setting, it's incumbent upon you to support RedHat by joining RHN or entering into a higher level support agreement.
Sure RedHat Linux is based on an free open source kernel...but RedHat packages it all together, does QA, write tools to facilitate management of the system and ease installation.
If that isn't of value, you wouldn't be using it!
Support RedHat, sign up for RHN, get your boss to sign off on a copy of RedHat Advanced Server...
The most wonderful aspect of RedHat or any other Linux based company is you get so much more than a license! You get a level of control that no other vendor can offer. As someone who supports RH financially, you or your company will benefit even further by being able to sway RH to meet your needs even more directly...
Here is a company that is actually promoting the linux amoung business..If linux is to succeed in business they need a gogetter like redhat
Unfortunately most open source software these days appear to be centralised at SourceForge. That's a massive weak spot that I worry about sometimes.
Ways I can think of off the top of my head--
- by getting something that can use for what they need. I make stuff all the time that I need. And I save a lot of money making it myself. If it turns out that someone else can use it then cool- they can have it.
- a sense of achievement. Don't write this off to quickly. A lot of people pay a lot of money to very high priced shrinks to feel good about themselves. If contributing to a project for the good of many others is beneficial to your well being- everyone wins.
Can you live on a sense of achievement? Of course not. I have a house, kids, bills, school loans etc. I know that. But I can do open source stuff on the side and it has benefits.
Those are two I can think of and I'm sure others here could put together a much better list.
I do not advocate that all software should be open source. I do not 'contribute' money to open source projects. (I have other places my charitable funds go that are much more urgent- homelessness for example) I do not fit in the pigeonhole that some above are trying to put me in.
There is a nice reply to my original post that moves in the direction I was thinking. Economics are going to shift and move away from this centralized mode of thinking and acting. I for one am glad. (that was the whole gist of what I was trying to get at)
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
They HAD the way out
You're viewing stock and finance as an emotional decision rather than a business decision. If I buy a stock or investment, I set a goal based on time and value of the investment. When that goal is reached I sell. Period. Unlike Enron where the top brass lied to everybody, Red Hat's management seems to be following a planned decision that at lot of execs (and peons) do all over the place.
Red Hat is starting to branch out into specialty products, e.g., the Red Hat database server. This is basically a packaged job based around the latest version of Red Hat, and a good copy of PostGres. But they have it nicely packaged, and they market it as a good solution at > $2,000. Presumably this comes with support.
... quite probably yes.
They probably also have upgrade contracts available for the people who buy these. You wouldn't need to save too many hours for that to be a reasonable price. It's not reasonable for me, because a part of what I want to be doing is learning how to build this, but for a company
They are selling a non-Linux embedded OS, for places where Linux won't fit. There will always be places too small for Linux. It's an open source OS, I think it's even GPL, but who's the expert in how to use it? Where does everyone else get training?
They really need to work on their advertising though. If they advertise that what they provide with the distribution is support, then people will expect that this is what they would get if they paid for a support contract, and I sure hope that isn't true. O boy do I...
The "support" that comes with a box is basically how to understand the words on the screen. Maybe a few of the most common glitches that occur. Their real support of the distributions is the error patches and updates that they release. And the major benefit that they provide is a consistent set of applications that work together. They need to clearly separate this from the support that they want people to pay extra for.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Why on earth are you using a 28,8k modem? You say that anything faster would bankrupt you but it has to mean ISDN or ADSL (oslt.) If you bought a 56k you'd save a lot of money in the phone bills. At least you could surf a lot faster.
Where have your banknotes been?!
Un*x Admin: "What happen ?"
Secretary: "We get signal."
Un*x Admin: "Main screen turn on."
RH: "How are you gentlemen !!"
RH: "We like all your base belong to us."
RH: "You are on the way to obsolescence."
Un*x Admin: "What you say !!"
RH: "We give you chance to survive make your time."
Un*x Admin: "Send out PO for great justice."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You know, this would be funny, except that the few contacts I've had with folks at RH have convinced me that they have a good number of technical folks who would quite cheerfully screw over their company just for the chance to tell someone how stupid they are.
You know who I mean... the type who would be on the other end of this conversation:
Customer: Hmm, you've made a pretty good case... what about scheduling groupware? We're using Exchange right now, and we'd like...
RH Guru: Then run Windows, looser.
Customer: Excuse me?
RH Guru: You mean you've never set up a distributed calendaring system using ssh and perl? What kind of company are you?
Customer: Um, an insurance company...
RH Guru: Then what the HELL do you think you're doing, touching our software?
Customer: Uhhh...
RH Guru: Come talk to us when you've bothered to write a few device drivers. Frickin' loosers...
*click*
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Yes, but Red Hat's core competency is reselling stuff they get for free. They can't acquire Sybase (like they did Cygnus back in the day). They'll promote wobbly MySQL grade stuff, things that don't threaten them and make them look like a pack of hackers.
I think you need to re-read your Marx, my friend... this is EXACTLY what capitalism is all about: the rich get richer, mostly due to the blood, sweat, and tears of the working classes.
Communism was supposed to fix this. It didn't.
RedHat 7.2 "Advanced Server" ???
Ok, so maybe next year they'll come out with
RedHat 8.0 XP , or maybe we will go to
RedHat/2003.NET ?
will upgrade a Gentoo Linux system from the freshest source?
Fresh does not mean:
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I'm not sure that I'm going for that one either! If I start a company and expend blood, sweat and tears to get it into a successful state, hopefully I'll be rewarded. If that reward comes in the shape of stock, I'll offload some of it to recoup my investment.
If I was top brass material, I'd be smart enough to negotiate for stock and be allowed to sell it on a term agreeable to the company and me.
Like I said, I think you're looking at this too emotionally. I can still believe in the entity I work for and sell some of my equity in that entity. I worked for a place where I got in on the employee stock purchase for $13 a share. I had to hold it for X days and then I sold it at somewhere in the high $20's. Didn't mean I was leaving the company or knew something others didn't.
Embedded Linux is a good idea, since instead of selling MC=0 software, you are selling MC>0 hardsoftware glop. Microsoft has this idea down pat with its OEM deals.
Selling software with a support/licensing model means that I (the customer) am paying R&D costs for R&D that I might not necessarily want. Also, I can free-ride on other people paying the R&D. I will pay this if I have to, but basically, it's subsidization or extortion (take your choice of words). I don't like its long-term prospects.
Now I haven't put too much thought into this, but I think the membership model is the way to go (think golf course, gym). Membership benefits could include employee workshops/lessons, IT analyses, configured hardware (like a web cache server), communications training, etc. I would much rather pay this variable cost than anything else.
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment
If this error seems to be incorrect, please provide the following in your report to SourceForge.net:
Browser type
User ID/Nickname or AC
What steps caused this error
Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy or some sort of service that gives you an IP that others are using simultaneously.
How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day
* Please choose 'formkeys' for the category!
Thank you.
Why are they spending more time trying to replace other distros of linux when their are thousands of other OS's they could be going after, os/2 win3.11 winNT etc. etc.
Of course the ratio in RHAT is heavily tipped to the marketters side! they are using the development power of the entire open source community, they don't need a lot of developers on their pay roll - that is the entire "open source for business" idea, you twit!
I guess they have a very thin hard core experts layer (think Alan Cox) and the rest are integration geeks to do QA and problem solving. Most of the development happens outside.
This is why most of RHAT can be sales engineers and staff and not coders, as opposed to closed soruce company that must carry on their pay roles the R&D departmen. Most of RHAT R&D dept., including some of the worlds greatest coders, aren't working for RHAT at all...
Gilad.
It's about fixing blame. If you have a vendor to blame, and some people who you can call to make it look like the problem is getting resolved, you can have the blame (whether it is your fault or not is really not the point) shifted away from yourself in your point-headed bosses eyes.
Of course, the problem with this scheme, which is really what the last 10-15 years of IT has been all about, is that it's been blame that's been fixed, not problems. Eventually businesses decided that building IT infrastructures and doing stuff besides e-mail and web was so problematic and expensive that it is simply easiest to keep it to e-mail and websurfing and leave it at that. When businesses and consumers en-mass stop buying computers because they are so disgusted with the way their computers don't work, you have the economic mess we have today. Some people point out that the dot-com speculation is really what caused this problem; I agree--you can't make a profit selling dogfood over the internet to people who are digusted with the way their computers work.
I've really gone off on a tanget. Mod down to off-topic at will.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Large organizations tend to carry along overcompensated freeloaders. (Read CEO, CFO, etc.)
Do you have any supporting arguments/ Yes, CEOs make poor engineers. There's a culture within Slashdot that assumes if someone doesn't have anythign supremely technical to offer they are useless. But experience at a lot of tech companies shows most engineeers also make extremely poor CEOs.
Oh, yeah, right.
Who are these evil Red Hat employees? If you're going to slander a company, at least do it right.
Last time I checked Big Blue still owns Lotus Domino Mail Server. It does do calendar/contact/to dos just like exchange.
Least my copy does.
And, if I'm not mistaken, it runs on Linux....
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Why not team up? I'm not saying merge, conglomerate or marry... just forge alliances and share technologies. Even competitors now and then get together to obtain better deals.
Join forces, products, learn to divide costs and do what dolphins and whales do: they team up to get more fish.
BTW, this works the same way with traditional Unix vendors: you can lose the deal *entirely* (for a distro _or_ for MS) or call some distro into play and negotiate a way to keep your client. You can, of course, try to talk MS into Unix. Good luck.
PS: A hint for everyone that's in the distro biz, from what happens to me. I'm a 3-year Linux user, but ease-of-use is not just what KDE provides. Neither is it just easier installation.
Well, Linux Standards Base is great, and will eventually get there, but you can help, too.
Instead of getting your own "invented here" solutions and pursuing differentiation now, stablish a common agenda with competing distros and avoid effort duplication. You can differentiate later.
Actually it is free, as in beer, at the moment. As you can see on this page: "Insight 2.9 is now free for a limited time. This is a full functioning version and does not have an expiration date."
and
"This offer is good now and until further notice."
The freeness seems a little precarious, though.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
You would be right ... If the software industry was a commodity industry with software as uniform products that could be interchanged at will. This, however, is not the case, at least so far as "major" pieces of software are concerned. In sectors where lots of people need to exchange information with other people in other companies and not all of them are /.ers MS has a defacto monopoly on a number of products (Office, Outlook...). This in turn leads to another de facto monopoly on other products (Windows XXX...), which in turn can be used for gaining advantages on development of other products (C++...) (cutting that short since the ins and outs of MS behaviour is well known). I for one am not terribly upset about this, if I was BG I would do the same, but it's a fact of life.
This makes the challenge for Linux on the desktop a tougher one, but if they/we make it Linux will wield the same kind of monopoly power with the interesting effect that since Linux is available to any developers, once/if it is a Desktop standard we will have a very tough time breaking loose (much to the chagrin of the next generation of /.ers)
For small software however, you are right. When was the last time you went out and paid money for an MP3 player, a jpg viewer, a zip program...? That kind of software is now, and in the future essentially free (as in beer). The only trouble you will have is to go out and find it.