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Red Hat CEO Predicts Open Source Infrastructures With Proprietary Business Functionality (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader summarizes the highlights of Fortune's new interview with Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst:
A recruiter told Whitehurst the culture at Red Hat was "a little bit like that Blues Brothers movie, when Dan Aykroyd says, 'We're on a mission from God.'" But Whitehurst says geeky passion "makes it a great place to be a part of," and even argues that the success of Microsoft in the 1990s can be attributed to its Microsoft Developer Network, which led developers into Microsoft's platform and infrastructure. "Developers now are heavily using open-source tools and technology and, bluntly, I think that's why Microsoft had to open source .NET and why they're embracing more open source in general. Because open source is where innovation is coming from and is what developers are consuming, it forces vendors to participate."
Looking towards the future, Whitehurst says "A rough line would be almost to say most infrastructure is going to be open source and most business functionality above it is going to be proprietary." And he also warns open source companies, "if you don't have the unique business model that allows you to add value on top of the free functionality, in the end you're going to fail... a lot of open source companies have come and gone because they've been more focused on the functionality versus how they add value around the functionality."
Looking towards the future, Whitehurst says "A rough line would be almost to say most infrastructure is going to be open source and most business functionality above it is going to be proprietary." And he also warns open source companies, "if you don't have the unique business model that allows you to add value on top of the free functionality, in the end you're going to fail... a lot of open source companies have come and gone because they've been more focused on the functionality versus how they add value around the functionality."
At least they're creating a great opportunity for a linux vendor that doesn't use systemd.
I wonder how long before we have a reprise of the unix wars?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Why are you still complaining about RHEL? Just use CentOS.
That's the first thing I thought too. It reads like RedHat is claiming to have invented some new revolutionary open-source business strategy to quickly cover up the fact they just figured out what everyone else already knew.
AFAIK CentOS uses systemd now too.
I haven't been around the software entrepreneurial scene for a few years but what resonated with me was that Whitehurst noted that open source (actually any company) must be able to provide a return on investment and not just value to customers/society at large.
When RIM was crashing, I saw a number of ex-employees pitch and get investments in open source based applications which did do things that provided significant value to customers but there wasn't a clear case that anybody would pay for the end product. Many of these products used the "freemium" model in which the base functionality was good enough for customers to use without having to take the plunge and actually pay for the product.
I know the money people considered themselves smarter than the average bear, but they really didn't go in understanding what Whitehurst said in TFA and ended up losing their investments, painfully, over a few years.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
that's why Microsoft had to open source .NET and why they're embracing more open source in general.
(Emphasis added.)
Yikes. Did the CEO of Red Hat really want to use that particular word?
"if you don't have the unique business model that allows you to extract money from users on top of the free functionality, in the end you're going to fail... a lot of open source companies have come and gone because they've been more focused on the functionality versus how extract money from users."
Red Hat has managed this is by replacing things that worked with "better" versions that mostly worked, so you would pay for their support for when it breaks.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
is it's free, so that's what the India tech workers get trained on. Training in India is cutthroat and cheap so they're not going to pay for software unless they have to. That's also why being an Oracle DB is one of the few things that's been a sorta safe haven for workers in the America, Canada & the UK. It's too expensive to train our replacements.
/. the other day and I suspect that's what's really driving the change. Like I always say: Good enough is always good enough.
There was an article on folks switching from Oracle DB to Mongo DB on
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Let it never be said again that there's no substantive difference between free software and open source—here you have an open source booster (Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst) pitching proprietary software as a good thing unto itself. Many years ago the Free Software Foundation told us about this when they wrote about the "Fear of Freedom" and the section that highlights how open source enthusiasts and free software activists react radically differently to non-free software:
Whitehurst mentioned "why Microsoft had to open source .NET". What freedoms does that really convey to .NET users? It's worth taking a look at Microsoft's Patent Promise for .NET Libraries and Runtime Components and understanding its limitations. This patent promise doesn't look out for your software freedom. As End Software Patents warned us two years ago:
Microsoft's "patent promise" so-called "protection" looks very different from how the GPLv3 treats users. End Software Patents summarizes the GPLv3's language in section 11: "[c]ode distributed under the GNU GPLv3[] comes with a patent grant which basically says the contributors can't use their patents against the users for exercising the freedoms granted in the licence" whereas Microsoft's "protections disappear very quickly for those who wish to modify or re-use the code".
Digital Citizen
The hammer is open source. So is the screw driver, nail gun, wrench, and plyers. Tools have always been open source. Tools have never been for the end-user. The end-user has needs and requirements, and isn't interested in building it themselves. That's where the expertise of having-done-it-before is valuable. That's why we pay people to do things that they've been doing for others for decades. Of course I can learn to do it myself. I can learn to do anything that millions of men have learned to do before me. But I'm not interested in sewing my own pants.
I'm not even interested in repairing the stitching in one inch of my pants.
And yet, the needle and thread, sewing machines, and wood-working tools are all open source.
Do I build my own couch? I could. It's really easy to cut wood, screw it together, cover it with foam, cover it with cloth. It's really easy to follow a pattern and a design and a template. Still, no thanks, not interested.
I pay for someone else to build my couch because I'd rather spend my time working in my chosen profession than building a couch.
Open source doesn't change anything to the end-user. My clients who sell white tube socks aren't going to build their own web-site. Sure they could, but they aren't interested. They also won't be their own security guard (also open source), paint their own offices (brushes are open source), or even ship their own desks (again, open source).
Every tool, and every obvious technique is open source. Who cares. You pay someone else to use those tools for you.
One day, 3D printers will become ubiquitous. And still, it won't matter. I'll want a widget this big and this shape to do this -- and I'll pay someone to design it. Whether they cut it out of wood, or mold it out of plastic, or hit print, is totally meaningless to me. I don't care what tools they use. I want my widget. And no, I don't want someone else's widget. Their widget won't fit my business model.
another freeloader trying to make a buck.
He and redhat are not on our side, tries to re-invent corporate unixes with lockin and excess profit. But that's not why we chose linux and Free as in freedom.
Enforcing his vision via systemd.
Since they are the only successful Linux company ever, I'd hold my horses before I bashed (no pun intended) them. Guys like RMS might, since they believe that people should just have altruistic goals and nothing more, but that's not how the real world works. Similarly, people just writing software and never expecting to get paid is something that we should accept as being rarer than pink unicorns w/ gold plated serrated horns
This does not have to mean what you imply it means. In-house business software is by its very nature proprietary. What Whitehouse is doing is essentially telling business that it is okay to build your own proprietary business software on top of FLOSS architecture, aka he's countering the usual 'if you use GPL software you must Open Source your internal software' FUD.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Oh sorry, I ddin't know that only RedHat used systemd... They don't so the constant moaning about it is getting rather tiresome.
They aren't, but RH corporate inexplicably pushed it despite greybeards thinking moving wholesale to an unproven system with a leader with known issues was probably a bad idea.
Ironically, systemd solved problems that were mostly already-solved in RH-land, which is the big reason for the pushback ~2014 when it finally hit EL7 and enterprise admins had to actually care about it. (Boot speed? Please. Could have gotten a lot of that by mimicing Debian's use of DashAsBinSh. Virtually everything else other than cgroup management already had better discrete tools for management in the ecosystem.)
I tend to think systemd's adoption was just a classic case of organizational disaster, pushed by a FreeDesktop team with an agenda and myopia, and project managers with more faith in developers than the sysadmins who actually run the product. But "proprietary complexity on top of open source" is another explanation, given how simple-to-grok shell scripts were replaced with a technically-OSS 100K LoC mishmash of non-deterministic spaghetti.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Many of these products used the "freemium" model in which the base functionality was good enough for customers to use without having to take the plunge and actually pay for the product.
Well it's tough to convince people to take the plunge on a relatively obscure product too, companies spend a lot of money essentially making sure the market knows what solutions they provide and the quality of their product. That's the point of this model which separates it from a demo or trial version, you actually get some basic functionality for free and because of that lots of people use it and lots of people have heard of you. The free part is basically advertising, it's not a bad model. It's only a bad model if you used up all your killer features on the free part because volume is everything and forgot that you need to have a conversion rate to actually make money.
It's hard to tell how the price/quantity curve works, if you got 1000 customers willing to pay $1000 that's a million. If you got a million customers and 10% willing to pay $10 that's also a million. If you got a hundred million customers and 1% willing to pay $1 it's still a million. Are you making the most money increasing margins with a better "premium" product or increasing volume by making a better "free" product? Most startups tries for "go big or go home", if you first hit a critical mass you might suddenly be making lots of money. Most will fail though, but then most ideas do fail in general.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Already there:
RHEL vs Oracle vs MS...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
... here you have an open source booster (Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst) pitching proprietary software as a good thing unto itself.
I think he's just commenting on the fact that while people are still deploying and using proprietary software, they're increasingly going to do it on open-source infrastructure.
So while he's not pitching proprietary software as a bad thing, I think it's quite a stretch to claim the opposite, from this story.
Okay so there are two take-aways here.
One is that anything that comes out of Redhat's mouthpiece is usually self-aggrandizing bullshit. That's not to say it's always wrong; just it's not well-developed. I can say any stupid thing based on first-observations and be right 0.1% of the time--that's approximately how economic political debates work (everything in economics violates common sense with an unlubricated broom handle). When Redhat is right, it's typically because their bullshit lined up with reality by a chance meeting.
The other is that Free Software Advocates like Stallman are die-hard communists. Stallman doesn't care about your freedoms; he wants to pry your work out of your hands on his terms. Stallman has said, directly and unapologetically, that the GPL's purpose is to force people to release their work to the world for free. He doesn't care about the labor a person puts into making a thing, and about his right to profit from his labor--or to attempt to in whatever way he sees fit, even if that way is misguided. Stallman doesn't believe in markets supplying an alternative. He believes that keeping control of your own work is theft, and that your time and effort belong to the world.
Free software advocates as such like to dismiss this line of reasoning by placing an opaque cover over the 150,000 man-hours used to make a relatively-complex application and point at the 0.001 man-hours used to supply a download pipe to copy it, claiming that's the entire cost they owe for the product, because they're not placing any load on the creator or taking anything away from him for making a copy. Never mind that he has no way to profit from it except by begging that someone pay him out of the very goodness of their hearts; these people believe that, despite not being compelled away from copying the product for free, they wouldn't be compelled to pay any price for it in any circumstance, but that obviously someone else would pay exactly the same for it whether it was given to them for free or dangled there with an attached price tag.
In effect, these people believe that consumers, given two prices ($0 and $50, for example), will always opt for the one the seller actually wants them to pay, or at least will actively-avoid the lowest one and pay the highest they are willing to pay in all cases.
Once you understand that, you never have to listen to them again, because theory-of-mind allows you to estimate what someone will say about anything even when that person's thinking is horribly wrong. Eventually, you don't have to ask RMS what he would say about a thing; you only have to ask yourself what RMS would say.
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