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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope
Brainsur writes "ZDNet reports about Redhat : European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act. While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism, the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community."
means striking pleasing postures for the investment community
I disagree completely. What it means is that you need to do right by your investors, not the investing community in general. If you're an open-source based company, your investors should realize that, and, if they are unhappy with the way you are treating your company, they have the option of selling it, or trying to force a hostile takeover.
An open-source company has to keep it's reputation, and it's actions towards the community as it's most important goal, because teamwork requires goodwill. The problem comes with all of the investment companies who buy into Redhat not because of who they are, but because of how much money people think they can make them. (It should be a little of both.)
Once that is accomplished, the rest should fall into place. The attitudes and actions of the company should determine the value of the company. It shouldn't be the other way around.
I have mixed feelings about RedHat. One one hand, they were one of the first that set the Linux snowball rolling, and have given a lot to the OS comunity. On the other hand, their Linux distributions were subpar, even with the amount of support they offered. For a while options like SuSE have been much much better. Anyway, everyone is entitled to fuckups. I hope they get on their feet again and do better!
....was to piss me off enough to try SuSE and Gentoo.
It would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name
the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community.
Who knew the secret ??? to profitability was Voguing.
While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism
I think this guy has it all wrong. The GPL isn't about altruism, it's about selfishness, and that's a good thing.
I must admit, I'm a bit cynical, and thus I have some trouble believing in altruism. I think Richard Stallman had a brilliant idea with the GPL. It was a way to turn the selfishness of every programmer, that desire to be able to look at how something was done, to both his advantage, and the advantage of people around the world.
What he's done is to create a system, whereby people with that programming itch (and you know what I mean if you've got it), will give away access to the product of their hearts and minds, just to be able to satisfy that itch when it comes to someone else's work, or someone else's improvements of their own work.
As a programmer, I think there can be no greater boon than to have people who want to use your software, and, even more so, people who want to see how it's written, and possibly improve it.
> Profiting off of Open Source requires that a
> business must sometimes give valuable IP back to
> "the community" for no direct financial reward in
> order for them to have the credit in the community
> to get the development they need in the future.
In other words, you want to use Open Source, you must "pay" the price in development effort. Or else. I don't know about you, but I prefer traditional business contracts with the price clearly stated upfront instead of this nebulous "you must contribute" obligation where you can always be accused of "not pulling your load". Of course, most companies do not sell their source code, as I am sure at least one hundred replies to this post will indignantly point out, but that is not the issue here: my complaint is about honesty. If you want to call your software "free" (as in beer), you better damn stand by that and not arrogantly state that "Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to the community". I have no problem with those who require payment for their work, be it money or development effort, but you better state that before "giving away" your software, and you better not be calling it "free" (that last one for you, GPL!). In the business world, such practices are called bait-and-switch, and are illegal. Of course, on Slashdot, any Open Source criticism is flamebait, so I guess I am just wasting karma points...
I manage serveral servers for a small sized ISP. Mod me down, but over the time since RedHat released their Enterprise line, I have felt that RedHat was going into the dark. People have become skeptical over their support schemes which they blatantly charge for. Their packages and applications have become too "closed" and again, somewhat dependent on RedHat Enterprise, period. We now prefer OpenBSD and FreeBSD over Linux. We call it simplicity over formality, not that it is all that is to it. Distributions like slackware or debian and the BSD flavors out there works just great and they are more flexible than RedHat Enterprise is. Besides, setting up and maintaining RedHat Enterprise is simply not much fun either!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I have a number of my servers on Reh Hat & Fedora. I just put SuSE on my personal work station to learn the little where do they put what in which directory that is different routine.
Well, I really like SuSE, REALLLY.
I think I will be switching all the servers to SuSE.
One thing I really like is console based YaST over SSH. It does everything the graphic based one does and works over slow connections.
Well, I am another convert
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
When I first tried Linux I started with redhat 5.0 and got a bad taste in my mouth toward linux at first. Things that really irked me personally were that every time I had to compile anything from source that I had to install a diffrent compiler from the get go. Seemed like they were always including some version of gcc that sucked. I dident care for the way that network interfaces were handled. RPM worked great for the redhat packages but for every 3rd party package it was dependancy hell as there always seemed to be some strange lib that was always needed but no reference to the package name! I applaud thier efforts but thier distro was definately not for the desktop. Of course I should shut up because I am now very pleased with using slackware on my servers and on the desktop. I know there are better distros for desktop linux but slackware is very easy to use for just what you want and nothing more. I can compile without having to replace gcc right off the bat and package management is easy any way you want to go. I wish them the best of luck and they are a great choice if you need support but if not there are better distros out there.
Got hosting
I think this is what it will boil down to:
Rehat vs. IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun
1) Sun's JavaDesktop is based on Suse Linux, and provides a very good mechanism for updates, for just one time cost of $50 (includes Star Office).
2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office.
3) IBM and Suse have been working with each other for a while. Especially in the Lotus Notes area.
4) Novell's new directory services can be used on Suse Linux.
5) Suse can be a cluster resource in the Novell Clustered environment.
Where does RedHat fit in this picture????
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
...striking pleasing postures for the investment community.
Yeah, who needs customers so long as some chump is giving us venture capital!
Now order me up another one of those Aeromonto chairs and install a Pac Man in the executives washroom!
We do computers! The laws of economy do not apply!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I disagree. I believe Red Hat makes quite a bit of their money from supporting their customers, than from just selling the software packages.
To most companies, the initial cost of software and hardware is not nearly as important as the long term support contract/plan. Many people thus choose Microsoft, because it provides support, while if you went with Debian, there is no support phone number to call when you run into problems.
And support is exactly why my ex-employer went with Red Hat, because he wanted to keep his x86 hardware, and also has the power of a UNIX system. I suggested using Slackware, because that's what I was running at the time, and he liked it. But after shopping around a bit, he decided to go with Red Hat because they provide support, and he is willing to pay $$$ for support.
your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism
Redhat is competing with Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Suse (Novell) and dozens of other firms in the OS market and you're describing its big challenge as surviving the marketplace for altruism? I don't think Linus cooked up GNU/Linux just so it could be run on the machines of geeks for the benefit of other geeks. He must have known that when he tossed that source code out onto the Internet that there was no telling where it would end up. Redhat's focus must be the blue-white fires of the business computing marketplace or it will be as passe as the "Nifty Fifty" of the 1970's. Where are they now? Ever check out the list of the Dow Jones Industrial Average components in 1960 versus now? Today's Microsoft is tomorrow's Litton Industries or Penn Central Railroad. Compete or die.
If you want to look deep into the future for Microsoft, this site tells all.
In principio erat Verbum.
Don't register your key. That'll keep it cheap. That, and find a good Yum or APT-Get repository, and you'll stay up-to-date. Yes, they have both out there for RHEL. All that you're purchasing with RHEL is a service contract that says that they'll come out and do maintenence on your RHEL computers without any additional charge.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Any business likes to create externalities, that is, it will pass costs on to others if it can. If the business can use free air and has a choice of cleaning it up or releasing it polluted, the obvious choice is to release the air polluted. It's cheaper and the profits are greater. The only restraint is usually the law. (although occasionally public pressure forces a business to behave.)
...)
In the case of free software, we have the case where the environment bites back immediately. It immediately punishes 'pollution'. My hope is that Red Hat et al find business models that work. Perhaps these business models can then be translated to other industries. ie. Open source business models might show us how to protect the environment.
Certainly, open source proves that profit is not the only way to incentivise the creation of value. This is good because economic theory lately has been going in a rather bad direction in terms of protecting the environment and our liberties.
An example of this is medical research. Research used to be conducted like open source. Now most research is funded by drug companies. The result is that if a disease can't be profitably be treated with a drug, it will be ignored. Cures that are not drug based are ignored. There will be no research that proves that cancer can be cured for free. Serious economists are starting to realize that this is a bad thing.
In "The Success of Open Source", Steven Weber cites a variety of sources that prove that open source is a better way to produce many 'goods'.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I'm cheering for Red Hat (and Suse and Mandrake and Debian
Why mod this to 0?
Debian is always good, stable, and apt, deselect etc really are great.
I have a couple of DEB boxes running, and they just run forever, oh so stable.
Linux needs Debian, and choices in general,
There is even room for the (slack, Gentoo) zealots.
CHeers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Hmmmmm, let's see...
1. RPM. Read the Linux Standards Base documents?
2. Anaconda, the install/setup program.
3. Kudzu, the hardware detection system used by Knoppix and others.
I could continue, but I think those three on their own more than justify the company's existence, if nothing else.
While I will admit that as an overall distribution I was not overly enamoured of Red Hat 9, RH have contributed solutions to a number of vexing problems for us, and also carry on a very active development effort at sources.redhat.com.
I'm also detecting some of the usual commie whining (No, I don't think OSS is communist, but this is) about a company that's daring to actually make a large profit here...as if every company purely by virtue of its existence had to inevitably emulate Microsoft's bad behaviour. However, it might behoove you next time to be a little more sure of your facts before you start bitching.
Let's see. ...
They have many people daily working on the kernel.
They have many people daily working on glibc.
They have many people daily working on gtk.
They have many people daily working on gnome.
They have many people daily working on
>What is RedHat giving back to the Linux community on which it feeds?
They ARE a BIG part of the communty. Accept it.
A couple of things
1) the idea of a consumer economy and a free market is that the public decides what they want to pay for and what they are willing to pay for it. if people can't fill that desire then they don't succeed as a business.
in a truly free economy -- which Free Software is doing a good job of ensuring -- the profit margins are always very thin. that's what competition is supposed to do. if another CEO is willing to live in a barrel so he can beat your company by offering service (or whatever their source of revenue is) then you had better do the same.
2) we have rule of law for a reason. that's how anarchy (not socialism) is prevented.
3) are people angry when they find out that kfc's chickens are being abused by the workers at the meat factory (throwing them against the wall, etc)? yes. does it affect kfc's business? yes. it's the same thing but in the OSS marketplace. in some markets you have to make sure you're not abusing your employees or else people won't buy your stuff. in this market you have to make sure that you're not seen as a leech or people won't buy your stuff.
THE RULES ARE THE SAME.
and none of this has anything to do with socialism. come on.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
man you're an interesting cat.
we're not going to a violent force-led market. redhat has contracts with its customers. they agree on what redhat will provide and they agree on what redhat will be paid. if the contract is breeched by either party you can take it to court.
the relationship we were discussing is that between redhat and the public. specifically the OSS-aware public.
do you think companies shouldn't have to think about what the public thinks? a lot of these companies are publicly-owned. they fail if the public doesn't like what they are doing. it is a balancing act for any company. if any company steps too out of line then the public keeps them in check. the public is the consumer and the public decides what they want and what they are willing to pay for.
what do you want? companies to be able to do whatever they want and have the public either not know or not care?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
You are paying (1) to get updates, (2) for their warranty protection, (3) for the right to get tech support from Red Hat and (4) for the (limited) right to use their trademarks on your computer with the software. If those are of no value to you, then don't renew the subscription -- I think all you need to do is edit out their logos and name.
Red Hat's business model is built around adding value to Linux. If none of that added value means anything to you, then don't buy it.
With developers like this, who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.
the white-hot fires of online altruism
I don't think so. Linux was forged in the 'white-hot fires of online self-interest'; altruism had nothing to do with it. The payoff was different things to different people, and since an easy concept like money wasn't involved a good many folks have a difficult time understanding and instead use the catch-all 'altruism' to explain it. Here are a few of the payoffs:
(1) Reciprocal contribution. Contribute code to a work and you encourage others to do the same. Whether you understand it on a conscious level or not the end result is a product that works better for EVERYONE involved. Everyone wins.
(2) 'Scratching the itch'. This certainly seems to be Linus's motivation for working on Linux. He does it because he enjoys it. He's stated, publicly, that he'd work on Linux even if no one else did. Linus's motivations, and the motivations of others like him, are no different than any other hobbyist: personal satisfaction. That's their 'coin'.
(3) Public recognition. Some coders code for kudos and respect.
(4) Practice and portfolio. Some folks work on open source projects to improve their skills AND their resume for jobs that pay money.
These are just some of the reasons I can list off the top of my head. But 'altruism' isn't a driving force for Linux development, and I seriously doubt that pure altruism (if there even is such a thing) accounts for the motivations of more than a tiny fraction of all coders.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Red Hat dropped our "consumer" product because it was a money sink. We couldn't afford to sell 100 licenses and promise support to 100 different people. Now, our enterprise customers usually funnel their support through a few people. We get better bug reports, they get better service.
We sell a Desktop flavor of RHEL3, and we will with RHEL4. It's quite nice.
But the fact is, GNU/Linux isn't ready for the "consumer" desktop - there are far too many things that don't "just work" and nobody has fixed them yet. That includes Debian, SuSe, Mandrake and all the rest. We'll be a step closer when ACPI is reliable and users don't ever have to unmount a filesystem manually.
Also, a lot of the importance of RHEL is that it is certified by ISVs. That costs a lot of money. If Debian was certified, that would certainly help.
It sounds to me like you are complaining because the GPL is fair.
Actually, you sound like a troll, but I'm not quite certain. You appear too intelligent to be a stupid as you are also appearing, though.
The GPL was not created for the benefit of companies, it was created for the benefit of generous programmers. Companies can, if they are careful, profit from it anyway, but they are truly of secondary concern. It also wasn't created to allow ANYBODY to make money from it. But it also wasn't created to prevent that. The GPL isn't about money! If you're fixated on that, go play in a different field.
Yes, everyone needs to make a living. This doesn't mean that everything they do is for the purpose of making a living, and those who *do* live that way are pretty shallow characters. And frequently suffer from strong moral defects (e.g. a certain Mr. McB*). Power is equally corrupting, though not quite as narrow. But the GPL ignores such goals. It just doesn't consider them at all. (So it's also an incomplete recipie for how to live one's life...but it doesn't pretend to be one.)
So the question them becomes: How is a company to earn money in the context of a community bound together in the context of an essentially artistic covenant like the GPL. The first rule is, AND MUST BE, honor the covenants of the community. If you don't, then expect to be at best considered as an outsider. If you HAVE been a respected member of the community and you betray the conenants, then you should the community to consider you a traitor, which you would, in fact, be. (Follow the syllogism backwards.)
Now it's a given that the community is not homogenous, so there will be variations in what is considered acceptable behavior... Caldera was considered a genuine, if fringe, member of the community. It's behavior was considered borderline acceptable. I have never considered Lindows/Linspire to be a member of the community. They just don't appear to either accept the principles of the community, or to be interested in joining it. BUT THEY AREN'T REQUIRED TO! They appear to be a friendly hanger on. They fill a niche that no good community member has filled, so they aren't even competing (which would be fair, if unpleasant). Sun, OTOH, seems to be an MPD case, which has personalities which are members of the community, and personalities which aren't. Their collective actions render them beyond the bounds of the community, but it's not clear that they are traitors in any normal sense of the word. More like a psychopath. You sure can't trust them, but sometimes they're friendly, and make you want to trust them. But the upshot is that you can't trust them.
So another characteristic that a company must have is that it must be trustworthy. This is difficult, as companies are inherently untrustworthy. (All it takes is one change in management.) And this means that the FOSS communities can't ever allow any one company to become too important. If that's your goal, go play somewhere else.
That's probably too much, even if I could continue, and so goodbye without a conclusion.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act
::sigh:: Sorry if this sounds like a bashing session. I really enjoyed RedHat in the past. Yes, I did purchase quite a number of AS 2.1 and 3.0 servers. I'm supporting them (in case anyone asks).
I know this is going to sound bad but I really believe that Fedora was a big mistake. The previous RedHat releases IMO were MUCH more stable by a long shot than any of the Fedora releases I've used. It feels like alpha software at time. I know people who have had great success with Fedora. For some reason I'm just not all that happy with the uptime.
In all fairness I believe it's probably not all that bad. My experience with it however hasn't been all that great. I've been with RedHat since 4.1 came out. Since Fedora I've switched to other distros including SuSE, Debian and Open/Free/Net BSD.
I'm hoping they will either fix it before releases are available for use or simply dump Fedora and go back to the good old days.
Yes, I've been told Fedora isn't what you should be using for production. In the past I haven't had any problems with production environments running RedHat 7, 8 or 9. Now I wouldn't trust anything to Fedora. I've spent months working with it in a test lab and chatting up a storm on the mail lists.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Red Hat has in my opinion had alot to do with bringing Linux to the main-stream. It was my first nonwindows OS (5.1) :) and has alot of sentimental value.
What we have to understand and accept, is that while the core of linux and alot of good apps remain free, and that there will still be alot of free distros, a company has got to make money and do the whole corporate thing. This does have advantages, like getting commercial software, drivers, etc.
There are 2 issues here.
1) The life/death of "Open Source"
2) Having an OS of choice on one's comp.
Redhat has done much to improve both in the past. And at least they're not sueing us or shoving their os down our throughts and making us pay for it. (no names mentioned.)
While the core system and many apps will still be open source, I say let them make and sell a professional system, that may not be completly open source, but that has the potential of loosing the stigma of "garage OS" that linux seems to have. (by no means do i think that, but it is a myth that floats around.)
All I want is more drivers and software.
I want my linux games section back in Frys and gamestop. If Redhat has to sell its soul to The man, so be it. ( all you OSS zealots can install Gentoo )
This type of setup is nothing new, McDonnalds, for instance, has ronnald mcdonnald house, for helping families; you think there doing that because it was a contractual obligation, no. There doing it because it, indirectly, makes them money- the goodwill it generates twoards the company helps cause potential customers to get them instead of others when they want fast food. Open source is not a fast food joint, but simmilar rules apply, if a company wants to earn the goodwill that will cause it to be chosen over another company, it needs to establish that goodwill; with contributions to the community
Part of those contributions, as well as establishing some 'good will' to allow you to be chosen above others, also establishes your level of credibility; like it or not being an open source company is still 'wild west'- lots of fly by night opperations come in and say ther open source, install things, and disapear overnight, sometimes with horribly mismannaged instalations; if your contributing code/bug reports, or setup documents, then you establish a reputation for your coders abilities with that code; a reputation that will show up in google when potential employers are looking you up.
This is not in any way different from the traditional buisness world; if I am simply a company that sets up microsoft systems and administers them, or makes modules for microsoft products, I had best have something that makes me stand out from the crowd as an expert, this can take the form of making free microsoft utilities avalible to all for download, waiting for the few that will be interested in your other services (winzip), creating in depth manuals for use by those who want to do something interesting with there systems (again to attract them to your website to buy your real products), etc.
You don't HAVE to do this, and you can still suceed, if only temporarily; espically if no one else dose what you do, if your a company that deals with open source GIS systems and complete integration with electrical grids and existing setups (or something else very much needed and rather rare) and your very good at what you do, you can give nothing back to the comunity- the lack of 'goodwill' that would cause people to turn to you is irrelivant, your the only one offering that service, however, eventually someone else will come along, and give more back, generating that goodwill, and getting the free development/upgrads/purchases from users/potential customers that that goodwill generates; and they will eclipse you-
And guess what- this is almost exactly what is happeneing to windows; they give very littel back to the 'comunity', and therefore do not have the goodwill to attract the type of people who will simply donate there work: Linux may still be rather immature, but often people WANT to use it, because it's 'feel good software', the linux comunity; though the GPL, free distrobution of code, etc. has generated a great deal of goodwill that makes many people want to use it- even if it's not the best product for the job; and then they help it grow, so that it will be the best prodcut for the job- once again for that goodwill.
Side note:
It is of no co-incidence that many closed source companies are 'open-sourcing' a lot of there stuff now; it's for this goodwill effect: The EXACT same way that companies like Mc-Donnalds fund charities, but in computer and software terms.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post