How Red Hat Can Recapture Developer Interest

snydeq writes: Developers are embracing a range of open source technologies, writes Matt Asay, virtually none of which are supported or sold by Red Hat, the purported open source leader. "Ask a CIO her choice to run mission-critical workloads, and her answer is a near immediate 'Red Hat.' Ask her developers what they prefer, however, and it's Ubuntu. Outside the operating system, according to AngelList data compiled by Leo Polovets, these developers go with MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL for their database; Chef or Puppet for configuration; and ElasticSearch or Solr for search. None of this technology is developed by Red Hat. Yet all of this technology is what the next generation of developers is using to build modern applications. Given that developers are the new kingmakers, Red Hat needs to get out in front of the developer freight train if it wants to remain relevant for the next 20 years, much less the next two."

Comments

Re:Mission Critical ... Red Hat... LOL..

[machineghost]

I think you're kind of missing the point. Developers don't think "hey, I know Ubuntu/Mint, and it works great for me, but yum just got a little bit friendlier? Forget everything I know, I'm installing Red Hat."

People change distributions with a purpose. For me personally the odyssey was:

Mandrake: because (I kid you not) it came on a CD in a Linux magazine
Gentoo: because of the performance gains
Mandrake: because (unlike Gentoo) you don't have to spend half your life compiling
Ubuntu: they did all the annoying stuff (eg. making Flash work) for me
Mint: Shuttleworth gave the middle finger to Ubuntu community vs. Mint 3s their community

The point is, no one is going back to Red Hat unless it offers something significant that their current distro doesn't (besides just yum). Making Red Hat one distro instead of two doesn't give me a reason to leave Mint. Making yum friendlier doesn't give me a reason either. At best changes like that might help stem the tide of departing Red Hat users ("why do I need Ubuntu, Red Hat finally got friendly") but if Red Hat ever wants to become a dominant distro again they have to offer a compelling reason to switch.

Trendy != Better

[Etcetera]

Given that developers are the new kingmakers, Red Hat needs to get out in front of the developer freight train if it wants to remain relevant for the next 20 years, much less the next two.

It's very hard to avoid a snarky response, but I'll try.

* Developers are not kingmakers
* Developers are not system administrators
* Developers don't understand operations
* Developers often don't understand scale engineering unless they can abstract it away by not thinking too hard about anything
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its derivatives) are not intended to be shiny new, but to be reliable
* Use Fedora if you want bleeding edge, or re-package things yourself. RPMs aren't hard.