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Red Hat Exchange Is Dead

Posted by timothy on from the milk-for-free dept.

darthcamaro writes "In 2007, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) — an appstore, if you will, of open source partner applications sold from a Red Hat website. Sounds like a good idea, right? While an appstore works well for Apple, turns out that an appstore for open source (from a Linux vendor) isn't such a good idea. 'When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but we've learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is challenging,' Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development said. 'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'"

26 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe... by StrategicIrony · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybed if they loaded it up with DRM, put restrictive policies in place to block certain apps and prevented open source publication of published apps, they would have been more successful.

    Then again, maybe not.

    1. Re:Maybe... by iamhassi · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think it works better for a phone than a computer. We're use to our computers being open, just finding software ourselves online or browsing computer software aisles and reading the backs of boxes.

      Phones, for the most part, have always been closed boxes, so when Apple offered a closed box with an "apple approved" app store, people were impressed. No one has ever offered a store on phones before, and if they did they didn't do a very good job.

      --
      my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    2. Re:Maybe... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No one has ever offered a store on phones before,

      Or, more generally, even just a teeny-tiny bit of opening up a platform that has been nearly universally 'closed' proved to be very popular.

      Just think how much more popular it would be with users if it was fully opened up.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    3. Re:Maybe... by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, I think it really has to do with expectations. I have a friend who sells an app in the Android app store, and also provides it for free on his website--- both source and binary versions. Plenty of people still buy it from the app store, because that's what they're used to doing.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    4. Re:Maybe... by Tiger4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If the App store offered some kind of seal of approval it might have done better. Say what you will about DRM at Apple, the app store at least gives the impression that all the apps there will work seamlessly together.

      OSS may be the greatest development model, bug fixes better and faster, blah blah blah, but really what people want to know is that it is going to work. If a knowledgeable, trusted, third party says it will, people value ($$$) that highly. No one likes to waste time on crappy apps, hoping a fix will come along RSN.

      --
      Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
    5. Re:Maybe... by Kitkoan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, I think it really has to do with expectations.

      I think that it has everything to do with expectations too. With an app store on a phone it is considered to many as the only way to get apps/games for that phone (I know its not the only way, but for many people I think they only know of that route). As for an OS's programs, everyone I know will google first before even considering what to get, sometimes to see if they can find a free one, other times to see a review of different programs since all OS's are much older then smartphone OS's like the iPhone and in turn have a much large amount of programs to choose from.

      --
      Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
    6. Re:Maybe... by ickleberry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe you are used to having phones that were closed box, but back in the day I went from having a phone that couldn't run any apps to having a phone that could install and run .jar and .jad J2ME applications and I had to go and look for them on the interwebs.

      Unfortunately as time went on a lot of crapware J2ME got released that were basically just front-ends for commercial web services and a lot of the J2ME app sites got greedy, put all their sponsored crapware at the top and charged programmers to have their apps (even freeware) listed.

      Even so, going from installing .jar/.jad and later .sis/.sisx seems to a limited 'app store' seems like a huge step backwards to me.

    7. Re:Maybe... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Exactly. That's why I refuse to use a phone for anything but making calls

      In any case, one can't count on your contact having a phone (or telco plan) capable of doing anything more than calls or SMS. Lots of people have basic phones, but possibly even more have comparatively "smart" devices that are (a) connected to a plan that doesn't offer more than a typically flaky GPRS conection or (b) connected to an owner that doesn't know what to to with anything other than a phone call.

  2. The ideal would be to merge Freshmeat with Yum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Would that work?

    1. Re:The ideal would be to merge Freshmeat with Yum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      You'd probably have to cook it first.

  3. A Linux 'app store' is like a church of atheism by eparker05 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most Linux projects are either made by FOSS hobbyists, or by big-name corporations, neither of those groups want to be tied into a distribution system owned by Red Hat.

    1. Re:A Linux 'app store' is like a church of atheism by selven · · Score: 2, Informative

      The Debian repositories are an app store, and I don't see FOSS people avoiding those.

    2. Re:A Linux 'app store' is like a church of atheism by selven · · Score: 2, Informative

      What is this difference? Most repositories have a filtering process (otherwise any malware author could get something in there, removing its security advantage). The only one I see is the presence of money, but an app store is still called an app store even if it offers free stuff.

  4. Au contraire... by Angst+Badger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'

    Actually, it sounds like the market worked with almost textbook efficiency.

    --
    Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
    1. Re:Au contraire... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It really mystifies me how a corporation can understand the concept of open source, but can't understand that in such a market distributors have 0 value. Open source software can't be sold as a product unto itself. It must be sold as a larger value add. Simply listing a bunch of software and saying, "Search through this for what you need" is not valuable because it doesn't provide anything substantially more than what people get on the internet for free. However, if you have a good sales force and are able to provide some upfront analysis of a customer's problem, I suppose you might be able to make some money. A large corporation might ask, "this is the problem we have, who would be best to solve it?" Finding the appropriate people to do the work (including supplying software, support and training) could be valuable. The thing is, I rather suspect that this will never happen. Having talked to Novel sales people before, and reading this article where Redhat talk about "partnering in various sales channels" I get the impression that they still think they are selling software. Nowhere do I see them understanding the idea of matching *people* with problems to *people* with solutions.

      I guess we'll see.

    2. Re:Au contraire... by turbidostato · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "It really mystifies me how a corporation can understand the concept of open source, but can't understand that in such a market distributors have 0 value."

      True. But integrators can rise a high value (Red Hat should know this: they basically make a living out of being integrators).

      "Open source software can't be sold as a product unto itself."

      False. Open source software *licenses* can't be sold. But software? Of course software can be sold as a product by itself. In fact, it is in the closed source camp where you are unable to sell software since once you sell it it's yours no more so you are force to sell licenses instead. The company that hires me is such an example: we develop open source for a living and we certainly sell it to the customers that ask for it: "-What do you need?" "-Whatever"; then we develop, install, support the "whatever" our client needs and present a bill for the work done. Pretty simple.

      "I get the impression that they still think they are selling software."

      I get the impression that they still think they are selling software *licenses*.

    3. Re:Au contraire... by hey! · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't think distributor necessarily have zero value. They just can't demand a cut without *adding* value.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  5. As compared with? by SteveFoerster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I never used RHX, so this is a serious question: What did this give people that, for example, Synaptic Package Manager or even the Ubuntu Software Center doesn't?

    --
    Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
    1. Re:As compared with? by MSG · · Score: 3, Insightful

      RHX was intended to be a marketplace. Software and support contracts were to be sold there. Here is an article covering its release; it's one of the wikipedia references.

      Synaptic and Software Center are tools, like PackageKit and up2date are in Fedora and RHEL. RHX wasn't an tool.

  6. RHX may be dead; captive markets are for zombies by ipX · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The summary left out the important bit of the quote...

    "When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace."

    I think part of the problem here is not so much the App store itself, but the fact that there is no FLOSS captive market to force $1.99 apps upon. Another factor may be that Red Hat is great since they support and tailor their product for a very specific purpose, but I'm not sure they really have the pull to make an App store with enough sales volume.

  7. Netcraft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    But has Netcraft confirmed it?

  8. Phone Message for Redhat by Xeleema · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Hey guys! This is Mike over here at Linspire! Listen, I'm calling from 2002 so I have to make this short; We have this great idea called 'Click-N-Run', where people will be able to use a client-side application to buy Linux software from commercial 3rd party vendors. We're gonna be huge!"

    --
    "When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
  9. Using the logic behind this.. by sleeponthemic · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm releasing a twitter for dogs. I know it'll be popular because twitter is. I shall name it Woofer.

    --
    I record my sleeptalking
  10. Maybe it's cuz by lena_10326 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    yer tryin to sell shit to people who think everything is free. Duh.

    --
    Camping on quad since 1996.
  11. Switch to ubuntu and an nvidia card by voss · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ive used Nvidia cards with my desktops and laptops with ubuntu(and Linux Mint which is based on ubuntu) couple years now.
    I had one problem in 2 years and all that I had to do was rollback to the previous nvidia driver in the package manager.

    What you have is not a linux problem its a Fedora and ATI problem. The Fedora logo should be a Fedora hat on guinea pig :-/

  12. iPhone and Android app stores by Burz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...were not created to sell existing apps.

    They were created to encourage small developers to write large numbers of new apps for their new platforms. "Hey look, if you write an app for our device, we'll make it easy for users to find you!"

    As someone else remarked, the FOSS hobbyist + large corporation types that tend to write for 'Linux' don't find that compelling. But what if we want to attract the small biz types that Apple and Google have?

    Well, consider this: both iPhone and Android have their respective SDKs to help get started and provide a solid sense for what each platform contains/does. RedHat's platform has no well-defined SDK and I'd even say it is no platform at all, unless you assume that servers are the target system in which case LAMP is the platform. But was RedHat trying to attract server apps with RHX? And isn't the target audience in that case sysadmis and web developers, people who are far too sophisticated to need an app store?

    At some point, Google will release Chromium and try to duplicate the Android experience on the desktop/laptop. It will have an SDK and there will be a clear idea of what's included and what isn't (what a dev has to supply in his apps). An app store for such a thing, a real platform, has a far better chance of succeeding.