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Analyst: Enterprises Trust Red Hat Because It 'Makes Open Source Boring' (redmonk.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the cool-means-getting-paged-in-the-night dept.

Tech analyst James Governor reports on what he learned from Red Hat's "Analyst Day": So it turns out Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat. By that I mean Red Hat sticks to the knitting, carries water and chops wood, and generally just does a good job of packaging open source technology for enterprise adoption. It's fashionable these days to decry open source -- "it's not a business". Maybe not for you, but for Red Hat it sure is. Enterprises trust Red Hat precisely because it makes open source boring. Exciting and cool, on the other hand, often means getting paged in the middle of the night. Enterprise people generally don't like that kind of thing...

Red Hat remains an anomaly -- it makes money in open source. It has new revenue streams opening up. It is well positioned to keep doing the basics, but also now have a conversation with the C-suite about transformation.
The article notes the popularity of OpenShift, Red Hat's Kubernetes distribution for managing container-based applications. (OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat's on-premises private PaaS product, now has 400 paying enterprise customers). And it also applauds Red Hat's 2016 launch of Open Innovation Labs -- a enterprise consulting service "to jumpstart innovation and software development initiatives using open source technology and DevOps methods."

105 comments

  1. Gnome 3 & systemd by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring, more's the pity.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring, more's the pity.

      Well, stupefying an OS could be considered a way of causing boredom.

    2. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Tranzistors · · Score: 1

      Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring

      Gnome 3 and systemd are 7 years old. The vision of both projects haven't changed much and both projects have been slowly and boringly going in those directions. What was the last outrage about in the last GNOME release? Emojis or was it tan suite?

      If you just don't those projects, I've heard good things about FreeBSD.

    3. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are you still pissed that you lost a VI vs Emacs debate?
      For a normal Red Hat implementations the system is going to be mostly headless so Gnome isn’t a big deal if even used at all. And if you are administering a system and you are constantly tinkering with its systems init setting. You are doing it wrong for the 21st century.

      On an enterprise system the system is loaded into a VM and the OS is configured to run one process and do it well. It isn’t like the 1990s where you had one system that was your database, web server, email server, login authentication, file server and print server. Where we more or less configured a PC to work like a mainframe. And if one part needed a new library then you needed to check all the systems because it was all integrated one one server. If someone got in they hit the mother load of data.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    4. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Junta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Gnome 3: At some point RHAT realized that the desktop just doesn't matter to their business, so the engineers are pretty much free to do what they wish. That's why in RHEL7 the desktop packages are no longer so conservative as they were previously. All RHAT's revenue is on the server side, which brings us to...

      systemd: Here's an example of a design that alienated a fair amount of the linux population. However, that population is folks who were interested in self supporting. Not RHAT's revenue stream. However, for those really knowing systemd inside and out, there's things in there that are easier to help support staff support *someone else*, particularly if the only convenient communication path is voice over a phone line. Sure, systemd can go off the rails and be inscrutable even to support staff, but that's when they break out 'just reinstall the thing', and honestly speaking if things are that bad and you need RHAT's support, it was going to be that bad anyway.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    5. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring

      Gnome 3 and systemd are 7 years old. The vision of both projects haven't changed much ....

      You can't change something that doesn't exist.

      OK, "Must write MOAH CODEZ!" is a type of a vision, but spewing code in search of a problem because you don't know how to solve issues with tools other than more and more lines of source code isn't a vision I'd be proud to have.

    6. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "systemd was designed for support staff" is the lamest anti-systemd conspiracy theory ever.

    7. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Junta · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's a simple reality:

      'read me the output of systemctl status httpd' is much easier than trying to get them to grep through /var/log/httpd/ file.

      In general, the move away from free-form text config and log files enables a huge number of these commands to rattle off. Commands that aren't any more capable than use of sed/grep/etc, but much much easier to tell people what to do.

      Knowing use of the text utils combined with plain text things enables the text based strategies to be more discoverable and knowledge to be more generally applicable, but hard to convey that to others. Also doing things with the text strategies can lead an admin to do less robust things that will fail, so it's not entirely without justification apart from support.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    8. Re: Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every major Linux distro adopted systemd. You are probably smarter than all of them, but maybe there is another option. And please don't say they were forced into using it. Accusations of coersion require evidence, which had never been provided.

    9. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Gnome 3 and systemd are 7 years old. The vision of both projects haven't changed much and both projects have been slowly and boringly going in those directions.

      First Lennart pushed systemd into Red Hat, and I did not speak out ---
      Because I did not use Red Hat.

      Then Lennart pushed systemd into Arch, and I did not speak out ---
      Because I did not use Arch.

      Then Lennart pushed systemd into Debian, and I did not speak out ---
      Because I did not use Debian.

      Then Lennart pushed systemd into my favorite distro ---
      and there was no one left to speak for me.

    10. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think we can consider GNOME to be pretty much a dead project at this point.

      Shit, early last month Slashdot reported that the GNOME project was having trouble finding maintainers for its text editor, gedit! It's really pathetic when what was once the most successful open source desktop environment is having trouble maintaining its own text editor!

      Any sensible GNOME 2 user has moved to MATE, Xfce, KDE, or one of the many window managers instead of wasting their time with GNOME 3. GNOME 3 is like Firefox. Yeah, it's still around, but it's generally ignored and smart people use something else.

    11. Re: Gnome 3 & systemd by hey00 · · Score: 2

      Every major Linux distro adopted systemd. You are probably smarter than all of them, but maybe there is another option.

      Yep they did. Why? Because RH has a long arm, because more and more stuff depends on it, and because it's easier to maintain by distrib maintainers.

      The distrib maintainers made a smart choice, from their point of view, for their interest. That doesn't mean systemd is better for their users.

      At the end of the day, we are left with less choice than we had before.

    12. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Here's an example of a design that alienated a fair amount of the linux population. However, that population is folks who were interested in self supporting.

      No, it's a tiny, very loud subset of that population that just enjoys rolling in their own noise at this point. Most people I know greatly prefer the ease of use, predictability & reliability (greatly reduced race conditions) of CentOS 7 to CentOS 6, for instance.

      I still do some admin part time and I haven't found a single thing that I could do with shell-based startup scripts that I can't do with systemd units (including calling shells scripts), while things like pre-requisites/requirements and parallelism are way easier with systemd.

      I'm sure there is some edge case where systemd doesn't work, but that's fine - there's nothing stopping anybody from booting with init=/some/shell/script and rolling their own.

      Current linux distros still follow the "make most things easy, make everything possible" axiom. Yeah, you might not get support from upstream when you roll your own init, but the people who are crying "but I want to roll my own init" ought to expect that, and hire third-party support if/when required.

      Most people are happier with systemd than SysV init and the people who are insisting that they should be unhappier based on some academic theory are not looking out for the best interests of the community. We use unix to make our lives more satisfying, not less.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    13. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Junta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      predictability

      I would say systemd could be called many things, but not that. The boot process is far less deterministic, by design. If one service takes a variable amount of time to execute, no longer does it block another so boot performance is improved as you no longer serialize a bunch of long-running service startups.. On the flip side, a missed dependency relationship means race condition, and a lot of the migration growing pain were services that had some implicit dependency that wasn't described at first. As time goes on, this baptism by fire does lead to a more robust understanding of service interdependencies.

      This may be a sane tradeoff, but I don't understand why we aren't willing to rationally acknowledge design tradeoffs, rather than going off at a hint of a mention that there exists a downside to anything.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    14. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But feeling when you've purged systemd from your infrastructure, took a couple of years, but what a relief and what a time saver.

      Even if you run systemd if you want to tell if a sysadmin candidate knows their stuff just ask them to remove systemd cleanly. (no not just load a different init, remove it, cleanly.)

    15. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's open source, free and Free software, since when couldn't we do what the f we want with it. If you use systemd and enjoy it, I'm happy for you. But where did you learn this "if you don't like it, use something else" attitude. Used to be that different use cases tickled different corner cases which when fixed improved design and exposed bugs before any real damage was done. Now it's "We've got our design, if you don't like it..."

      Some worshipers are never happier than in the cathedral, others find the relationship abusive.

    16. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "systemd was designed for support staff" is the lamest anti-systemd conspiracy theory ever.

      True.

      There's no evidence systemd was designed at all.

      "Oh, crap. Didn't think of that. Now we need our own kernel-based DNS system because we didn't think ahead!"

    17. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      predictability

      This may be a sane tradeoff, but I don't understand why we aren't willing to rationally acknowledge design tradeoffs, rather than going off at a hint of a mention that there exists a downside to anything.

      Well, the lead dev of systemd isn't willing to consider corner cases and is the kind of guy flipping off at any criticism, no wonder it spurred fanboys acting like him...

      Yes, systemd has some good points. Denying it has issues, that most users are in practice forced to use it, or that it is an ever growing beast that is detrimental to diversity in the linux ecosystem is as stupid as saying the whole of systemd is shit that should not have be created.

      But when the lead dev of the project cannot be reasonned with and is backed by RH's money, we get the current situation.

    18. Re: Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Choice is bad. The tek name for it is **NOISE**. All choice is all bad.

    19. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      ""loaded into a VM and the OS is configured to run one process""

      and thats why we remove systemd from the vm or container. It's just not needed in this context.
        We remove it from the host as well but thats for other reasons.

    20. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep agreed, systemd makes everything easier. Especially for generating race conditions.

    21. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      why don't you just use solaris or AIX instead?

    22. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Tranzistors · · Score: 0

      and there was no one left to speak for me.

      You forget that Linux is about choice. It seems you would like to restrict the distributions to choose their preferred init system. I have changed distros because I didn't believe in their technical and political decisions and that is fine.

      As for the choice of the poem — trying to compare changing init systems to literal slaughter of millions of people really puts this systemd issue in perspective. Alas, this is trivializing horrors of the Nazi regime.

    23. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Tranzistors · · Score: 1

      early last month Slashdot reported that the GNOME project was having trouble finding maintainers for its text editor, gedit

      In the gedit home page I found this gem:

      About gedit maintenance: gedit has been marked as unmaintained recently, now two new developers have proposed their help to become new maintainers. If you want to help, reach us on the IRC channel or the mailing list, thanks!

      Perhaps you should get the latest on the breaking news.

    24. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Etcetera · · Score: 2

      Here's an example of a design that alienated a fair amount of the linux population. However, that population is folks who were interested in self supporting.

      No, it's a tiny, very loud subset of that population that just enjoys rolling in their own noise at this point. Most people I know greatly prefer the ease of use, predictability & reliability (greatly reduced race conditions) of CentOS 7 to CentOS 6, for instance.

      That's funny -- my experience has been the exact opposite. Many folks (ie, companies) I know are dragging their heels on the EL7 migration (far more than they did from EL5 to EL6) and systemd UNpredictability, UNreliability and greatly increased race conditions has been a big part of that. (The other parts are either firewalld-based, the large number of other changes that happened, or general enterprise conservativeness.)

      I honestly wouldn't be surprised if EL7 ends up as the Windows Vista of the Enterprise community... Skipped by anyone who has any option to do so.

      I still do some admin part time and I haven't found a single thing that I could do with shell-based startup scripts that I can't do with systemd units (including calling shells scripts), while things like pre-requisites/requirements and parallelism are way easier with systemd.

      Parallelism is indeed easier (as it should be, since that was the goal), but it's the appropriate solution in far fewer cases than one would think, often for little benefit. Parallelism in startup often increases risks of issues, depending on the daemon you're using, puts increased load on spinning disks ("We're not going to support readahead any more because all our laptops have SSDs!"), and resulted in a whole host (no pun intended) of intermittent, hard to isolate bugs for years before things shook out.

      The only other thing systemd does *well* is cgroup isolation. But there are other ways to deal with that that don't involve all the other drawbacks, feature creep, and change that the rest of the systemd project has brought down.

      I'm sure there is some edge case where systemd doesn't work, but that's fine - there's nothing stopping anybody from booting that, and hire third-party support if/when required.

      Yes there is. Do you not understand what EL is? If the systemd "cabal" had wanted to allow choice in process launching/supervisor system, they would have had systemd hanging off of the existing init process a la xinetd to give it time to mature. As-is, they couldn't wait to burn the ships like Cortez and attempt to lock people in to systemd as soon as possible. A lot of smart people worked on Devuan and it still took a year to unwind systemd from the system. (This goes especially harshly for those with a need to run a GNOME environment on their systems.)

      Most people are happier with systemd than SysV init and the people who are insisting that they should be unhappier based on some academic theory are not looking out for the best interests of the community. We use unix to make our lives more satisfying, not less.

      I'm happy that systemd seems to work for you. We (users and sysadmins who were pretty fine with deterministic, shell-scripted, predictable boot initialization) would have preferred you isolate your code away from the rest of the community. If Fedora and Ubuntu wanted to have systemd as the preferred init system for their laptop-focused distributions, hey more power to them. But server administrators never asked for this crap and got it foisted on us against our will.

      --
      Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
    25. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      It is also about portability. Where you can upgrade one component or rebuild a component to a fresh install without having worrying about other systems. Also you can clone a VM and put the file onto an other server and perhaps some setup and you have a redundant system, or at least a backup of a working system.
       

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    26. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      why don't you just use solaris or AIX instead?

      Your question highlights exactly the problem most people have with systemd.

      If I said "I don't like gnome", you'd have said "why don't you use kde or xfce or whatever?" If I said "I don't like vim", you'd say use "emacs or gedit". If I didn't like sysvinit, you'd advise me to use upstart or openRC or systemd.

      If I don't like systemd, your answer is to completely change my OS, not to use one of the existing alternatives to systemd. You see the issue? You acknowledge that at the end of the day, it's near impossible to use linux without systemd today, that's the problem we have with it.

      BSDs, Solaris, AIX, windows don't suit my needs. GNU/Linux did, but the windosification and unification that RH is pushing like mad, and that the other distrib maintainers swallow, makes it less and less suitable. I used to use GNU/Linux because it was great, I use it now because it's the less worse.

    27. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That thinking came mostly from the DLL-Hell on Windows. On a UNIX, every application can have their own set of libraries so upgrading one will not impact the other programs.

      Also, if upgrading a library causes problems, someone made a big mistake.

    28. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Tranzistors · · Score: 1

      Now it's "We've got our design, if you don't like it..."

      I see your concern, but the systemV vs systemd debate in Debian showed that keeping both systems as options was not practical, since the maintainers will have to maintain both systems, which is expensive. It is unreasonable to demand people to maintain options just because you in particular want to. What you need is a momentum of consensus (at least in community projects). It's just that right now I don't see any of the switched distros moving back to SystemV or OpenRC any time soon. What are the long term sans-systemd systems? Devuan looks rather shady, but the FreeBSD system looks pretty nice.

    29. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Still if you hose up a system with over configuration and say to a point where you need to reboot, then you bring down everything just to fix one application.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    30. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by jabuzz · · Score: 1

      No it's about long term ease of maintenance. Eventually your OS will be out of support and you will need to upgrade. I would rather upgrade 10 VM's one at a time than one with 10 services in one go. If you can't see the advantages of option one then you have not been through option two. In fact I have never been through option two because the services where spun out into single service VM's one at a time till I could turn the physical server off.

      Further Linux high availability sucks (this is from bitter experience) so want high availability then fire up a VM based solution and it actually works.

    31. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Junta · · Score: 1

      I will confirm that on my end, I'm still having to support a *lot* of new deployments on EL6. By the time EL6 was this old, *new* deployments of EL5 were pretty much unheard of.

      I will say I have not questioned them as to why. systemd certainly stands tall as one difference, though it could be a more 'el6 was good enough', and generally the upgrade treadmill has been slowing down as the industry has 'grown up' with linux (same curse as microsoft, who faced more and more uphill battles upgrading their customers as time went on).

      I honestly wouldn't be surprised if EL7 ends up as the Windows Vista of the Enterprise community... Skipped by anyone who has any option to do so.

      If the assumption is that EL8 will change away from systemd, I'm pretty sure that's not in the cards. Of course systemd had atrocious bugs and the ecosystem wasn't ready when 7.0 happened, so it might be fair to say that systemd will be better by 8.0. Just like networkmanager in EL6 is a horrible mess that must be disabled, but in EL7 networkmanager can be lived with a lot of times, except systemd can't be disabled when it breaks you. Of course the majority of users I deal with still disable networkmanager even in EL7, so even if it is livable, it might still be unwelcome. systemd might have a harder battle as the team seems a bit more militant about their vision and less open to criticism compared to networkmanager, which despite screwing up horribly actually reacted well to criticism and improved.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    32. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 1

      On the flip side, a missed dependency relationship means race condition, and a lot of the migration growing pain were services that had some implicit dependency that wasn't described at first. As time goes on, this baptism by fire does lead to a more robust understanding of service interdependencies.

      This is one way to describe it. Another way to describe it is "the existing init services didn't even document their own dependencies correctly and the only reason things worked out was because they were accidentally serialized".

      This may be a sane tradeoff, but I don't understand why we aren't willing to rationally acknowledge design tradeoffs, rather than going off at a hint of a mention that there exists a downside to anything.

      I mean, I acknowledge for sure that if services do not properly document their own dependencies, things will not work. This is a lot like saying saying that (C) programs which do not check for NULL before dereferences ma crash. No one should be "going off", and the rudeness of systemd developers is legend, but at the same time this is a fairly lame complaint.

    33. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm a developer and I'm just fed up with systemd's random breakage.

    34. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Junta · · Score: 1

      The major problem being a race condition can pass an initial test, and then bite you later. So a screwed up implicit dependency that failed 100%, not so bad, but the nature of the beast has been looks good at a glance, fails later.

      The problem being that the benefit (faster boot) is generally limited in benefit, but the risk of another vector for common boot time failures is made higher.

      I will confess my biggest gripe is journald's binary-only format for log data (yes, I know journalctl will do nifty things, but nifty things could have been done with plaintext logging and binary metadata to the side). Also udev has gotten a bit more wonky as of late, and frankly it's beyond my understanding to quite understand why. systemd can go nuts and spazz out with a service restarting sometimes (again, I'm not sure why..0, but the prinicple of being able to externalize the daemonization, building in watchdoging a service, and using cgroups to keep hold of the services isn't too bad an idea.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    35. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by EETech1 · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't a competent administrator already know that bar has to be started before foo, and then add that to systemd?

    36. Re: Gnome 3 & systemd by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I'd wager you're a poor developer. Why? You'd know nothing on your computer is random, other than by name, if you were a good developer. At best, you have pseudo random and unpredictability. Neither is really random, however. Very few things, if any - depending on your school of thought, are random. The breakage of systemd is, by no means, random.

      A good developer would know this. Maybe you'll find Windows to be a bit easier? Then again, judging by your comment, I doubt that you're a developer or that you use Linux. If you are a developer, pleae keep your code proprietary and locked up for in-house use only. We have enough bad code already.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    37. Re: Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a truism that most folks won't understand the real meaning of terms like {random, unpredictable, entropy, information} until they spend a whole bunch of time studying information theory, dealing with low level crypto innards, wrangling loads of stats data, etc. Preferably all of the above...yeah it's not exactly common...and this is why the net is the way it is. -PCP

    38. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why should I change because some loser-developers dictate systemd onto everyone else?

      You write it is all about choice - WHERE DO THE USERS HAVE A CHOICE?

      If someone has to go, then it is loser-developers who dictate shit downstream onto the innocent users.

    39. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you do not dispute that it did not have any developers until recently?

      Way to go Joe!

    40. Re: Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ok. So where was the voting?

      Oh that's right - THERE WAS NONE!

      Some corporate hackers decided to make the decision.

    41. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lots of claims in your note bill_mcgonigle - none of them are correct.

      > it's a tiny, very loud subset of that population

      It is not tiny - it is a massive seize of the population.

      The even bigger group is the one that has no opinion.

      Since you wrote "tiny", please provide some statistical dataset to show that you are not pulling these shares outta your ... somewhere.

      > Most people I know greatly prefer the ease of use,

      You can also know zero people, so that does not mean anything.

      > predictability & reliability

      Where exactly?

      > greatly reduced race conditions

      I never had a race condition. Can you explain the massive occurence of race conditions?

      > CentOS 7 to CentOS 6, for instance

      People who use centos can't be helped.

      > while things like pre-requisites/requirements and parallelism are way easier with systemd.

      You are aware that sysvinit is not doing the things that systemd does? So how can you
      compare apples to horses again?

      I don't see any of the need. Daemons can be run on *nix without systemd. What prevents
      you from starting them?

      > I'm sure there is some edge case where systemd doesn't work, but that's fine - there's
      > nothing stopping anybody from booting with init=/some/shell/script and rolling their own.

      This is missing the point - the point is why downstream users were FORCED to adopt
      systemd.

      > Current linux distros still follow the "make most things easy, make everything possible" axiom.

      I don't see that axiom. Are you creating axioms here?

      > Yeah, you might not get support from upstream when you roll your own init, but the
      > people who are crying "but I want to roll my own init" ought to expect that, and hire
      > third-party support if/when required.

      Ah, so you admit that you want to force people into hiring third-party support? Well
      that explains why systemd exists. :)

      Greedy developers want to get more money by a complex, intransparent system.

      But again, the issue is not "roll your own init" - the issue is how distributions FORCED
      people to adjust to the systemd way.

      > Most people are happier with systemd than SysV init

      Says ... who? You? What statistics do you have?

      And, what choice do they have? Let's face it - people who don't want systemd, will
      not change the "init" system at that distribution - they will simply switch to other
      distributions.

      http://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/005_distrohop_p1/

      > the people who are insisting that they should be unhappier based on some academic
      > theory are not looking out for the best interests of the community.

      Huh? But you are looking in their best interests? How nice of you.

      Can you show us the poll you did to ask people? Or did you simply decide onto them
      what YOU want?

      > We use unix to make our lives more satisfying, not less.

      Exactly. Now - what does this have ANYTHING to do with systemd???

  2. Anamoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Red Hat remains an anomaly -- it makes money in open source.

    Because they don't pay open source developers (ignore the few people they pay, like systemd devs). Their model is like this: News reporters work for free to create news stories. Then Red Hat delivers the newspapers to customers and charges for delivery. It's like a law firm where the janitors and legal assistants get paid, but the lawyers don't.

    1. Re:Anamoly by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Their model is like this: News reporters work for free to create news stories. Then Red Hat delivers the newspapers to customers and charges for delivery.

      The reporters work for free, but the editors, typesetters/web-publishers, press operators and delivery workers do not. Basically the parts of the job that aren't any fun.

      's like a law firm where the janitors and legal assistants get paid, but the lawyers don't.

      Lawyers hate themselves and their jobs, for the most part. They wouldn't be the kind of low-life scum they are but for the money. Not to mention actual costs lawyers have to do their jobs from legal fees to research to insurance. They will be paid or they will not do their job.

      Not true for open-source developers which often do what they do simply because they can, or moon light under some pseudonym to avoid clauses in their employment agreements. It's FUN to develop and design. It's really not fun to turn the crank that makes those designs actually work for real people, to wake up in the morning and look through your issue tracker and fix your shit, etc. This is pretty much the same reason that "linux on the desktop" is always in the near future but only arrives in the present when some company (like Canonical) tries to make it happen. Once developers get the UI *they* want, they're done and walk away. It takes a lot of work to turn that UI into something that works for a larger audience of people whose jobs involve different things that the developers don't see or understand. That work isn't fun, so people have to be paid or won't do it.

      This may be the shape of things to come. Quite a lot of technology can be summed up as "things that are fun to do, that we'd do for free" and "things that take a lot of work, that we hate doing". The former category has, in my observation, become somewhat harder to get employed for and is often contracted out, while the latter category ends up being fully staffed and internalized. This is true for open source or not.

    2. Re:Anamoly by Junta · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, relatively speaking they pay more open source developers than other 'open source' companies.

      Now there are companies that pay for more open source developers, but of the ones seeking to use Open Source as the basis of their business model rather than incidental to their mission, RHAT is ahead.

      This is one of the reasons why when RHAT declares a move, the other business oriented distributions have little choice but to follow, as they lack the resources to do much.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    3. Re:Anamoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seriously? You think "lawyers are low-life scum"? How old are you?

      Your prejudice is pathetic and disgusting.

    4. Re:Anamoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is one of the reasons why when RHAT declares a move, the other business oriented distributions have little choice but to follow, as they lack the resources to do much.

      Good. Let those who ante up and have the most skin in the game make the decisions.

    5. Re: Anamoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "It's FUN to develop and design. It's really not fun to turn the crank that makes those designs actually work for real people, to wake up in the morning and look through your issue tracker and fix your shit, etc. "

      Might be true for developer, but as the one who turn the crank for 15 years now I still have fun doing so. And when I talk with dev, it just sound boring repetitive tasks. And just to make it fun for us, the dev manage to produce a lot of differents kind of issues. You can be amazed with each 'ew product.

  3. system8===D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Redhat agent Lennart Poettering is destroying linux, and millenials are too cucked to do anything to stop him.

  4. Where is the wheelbarrow? by s0nspark · · Score: 1

    Open source certainly is a business for Red Hat - they charge a ton of money for it!

    1. Re:Where is the wheelbarrow? by infolation · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Money is the reason companies trust Red Hat, not 'boringness'.

      Paradoxically, companies find free things scary. When a supplier charges for a product or service, companies feel the supplier has a greater contractual obligation to provide what was asked for.

    2. Re:Where is the wheelbarrow? by Junta · · Score: 1

      I'd say it's both.

      Churn is the enemy of the enterprise. A comfortable feeling that their staff will only need to retrain every 5 years or so, and even then it's not going to be particularly severe is important.

      The businesses that are ready to push the envelope and get the latest and greatest technologies at a breakneck pace do exist. The problem being that such companies aren't interested in paying an external company like RedHat for support, they want the talent in-house. Even in theory, efforts to support such customers are expensive, each one can settle into their own cadence sticking you with the nightmare of many confusing iterations to support. Ubuntu is the current darling of this audience due to the 6 month release cycle, and one of Canonical's frustrations is that despite this strong position, they haven't been able to turn it to profit because that audience doesn't need the paid support services.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    3. Re:Where is the wheelbarrow? by Mr+Foobar · · Score: 2

      Paradoxically, companies find free things scary. When a supplier charges for a product or service, companies feel the supplier has a greater contractual obligation to provide what was asked for.

      My large national Fortune 500 company uses both RedHat and Microsoft contracted-service products at very high tiers. Guess which one we hardly ever need the service, yet they provide it in an instant to us? And guess which other usually can't be the least taxed with picking up our phone calls for support? RedHat has been a solid supporter of our IT operations.

      --
      -> I dislike sigs...
    4. Re:Where is the wheelbarrow? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "a greater contractual obligation to provide what was asked for."

      and that would be true except for the actual contract terms.

  5. No anomaly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Red Hat remains an anomaly -- it makes money in open source.

    IBM makes money in open source. Hell, so do Microsoft. In all three cases (and many more) it isn't the license to the software that's the product. That's all.

    1. Re:No anomaly by Junta · · Score: 1

      I think the point is pure-play open source companies. IBM nor Microsoft are anywhere near pure-play open source. Open source is largely incidental to their value proposition when it comes up.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  6. Red Hat are total failures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes Red Hat are total failures, you cant even see that they get more money from microsoft than from their own sales. They are serving microsofts EEE strategy for now. Eventually they will get the shaft and they will spiral into bankruptcy and everyone will wonder what happened. Thats when linux will be dead and BSD will be the last holdout for who knows how long. The future of open source is you , that everyone makeing their own OS if they are capable. Thats them alone by themselves making it for themselves. nothing else will be permissable from the rules they are now putting in place.

  7. But.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Red hat uses the mysterious systemd.

  8. Where is the history? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Red Hat has first mover advantage when people were still debating about what good was open source. It's one of the few that has survived from the good old days because it did all the work the open source community was unable or unwilling to do and in those days (and still is) was a LOT.

  9. FWIW by coofercat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    FWIW, I tend to agree - most of my recent jobs have been on Centos* - it's whatever it is, and it does that thing pretty well. The devs complain because they can't get QT to work on it, or some other 'shiny', and that "we never had these problems when we used ubuntu", but Centos offers long supported lifespans, decent update schedules and for the most part it's pretty solid (I found a machine not so long ago with process that were 6 years old on it - that's pretty awesome, even if it's a complete security fail).

    So yes, Centos is good for what it does, and so Redhat is good for making it. How Redhat really benefts from all this Centos is not really clear though.

    * one such job was at a very wealthy stock traders. I did have something of a moral objection that they were cheaping-out on Centos (which at the time wasn't sanctioned by Redhat, and so we had a few problems upgrading the OS). It's harder to begrudge a 5 person company doing that, and I'm not sure where on 'the scale' my objection would sit. Either way though, Redhat still aren't getting much out of the deal.

    1. Re:FWIW by Junta · · Score: 1

      Particularly from the perspective of having to support devs from *entirely different companies*, supporting folks is a pain. Over a half-dozen iterations of Ubuntu are likely, and beyond that a myriad of random ppas and random install-from-tarball or gems or pypi...

      Supporting customers on CentOS/RHEL is so much easier because we generally only have to support two camps for new software: RHEL6 and RHEL7. Of course some of my python devs *hate* having to continue to be compatible with python 2.6 for the sake of our RHEL6 users, but I'd much rather have that problem than supporting the sea of direct from upstream or rapidly churning distro cut off at random arbitrary points per customer.

      Note this isn't about CentOS/RHEL making the customers easier to support, but the customers that *choose* that model are a mindset that's easier to support and also more willing to spend money on getting support. If folks wonder why vendors are not as enthusiastically supporting Ubuntu and similar, this is the reason.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:FWIW by Junta · · Score: 1

      I will also say that this isn't a horrible thing for those using Ubuntu or Debian. It's just that it's best to live with efforts to support RHEL being close enough to support Ubuntu for free, and some self support to bridge the gap.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    3. Re:FWIW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't need to be Python 2.6 compatible. Software Collections for RHEL / CentOS packages Python 3.5 / 3.6. If you have a subscription its fully supported. It has been this way for 3 or 4 years now.

      https://developers.redhat.com/products/softwarecollections/overview/

    4. Re:FWIW by Junta · · Score: 1

      It's one thing to do software collections to yourself for the sake of getting your pet python project to work.

      It's another thing to *require* a customer to do it. Software collections aren't an utterly trivial thing like 'use the python that comes with the base repo'

      We have some internal use of software collections and it's not for the faint of heart. The nature of the beast is that the 'normal' python working is priority #1 for the os, and software collections have to inevitably work around that. Software collections for any httpd related stuff is even worse.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    5. Re:FWIW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've never used a Rehat-based distro, but are you saying Qt won't work on it? WTF?!! And you dismiss it as 'shiny'?

    6. Re:FWIW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > So yes, Centos is good for what it does, and so Redhat is good for making it. How Redhat really benefts from all this Centos is not really clear though.

      Most of the places I have worked use CentOS for Dev/Test and RHEL for production.

      It saves the company money on the dev/test side and then when it rolls to production the company wants to make sure it is fully supported so they opt to buy RHEL. That is, IMHO, how RedHat is utilizing CentOs to generate RHEL sales. ;)

  10. Gnome 3 & systemd-Cleaning the mess. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Any serious business would already be familiar with virtualization, snapshots, and separation of data (even configuration, although things like Chef help with that burden). So the Windowism of re-installation is no longer as necessary as it use to be.

    1. Re:Gnome 3 & systemd-Cleaning the mess. by Junta · · Score: 1

      While there are good practices in there, it's not exactly a good thing to say 'it's ok if things are more likely to go to reinstall than before because best practices means low risk'. The even better thing is 'still as unlikely to need reinstall, but even if you do it's no big deal'.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  11. Re:Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're paying for RedHat, for a single instance? What the actual fuck, creimer?

    ISHYGDDT.

    https://www.centos.org/

  12. Re:Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're paying for RedHat, for a single instance? What the actual fuck, creimer?

    ISHYGDDT.

    https://www.centos.org/

    $49 per year = peace of mind

    Who the fuck is creimer??

  13. Good For Red Hat by StormReaver · · Score: 0

    I'm glad to hear that Red Hat has revenue sources outside of the operating system, as Red Hat is, for better or for worse, a standard-bearer for Linux. That said, we can't finish our migration away from that monstrosity fast enough.

    I used to think that Debian proponents were just jealous that Red Hat was the leader, and stayed with Red Hat for years; but after having given Debian a trial-run (initially through Ubuntu, then Kubuntu, then Debian servers) several years ago, I realized how wrong that thought was. Debian servers are a breeze to manage, because everything is consistent and well thought out. Managing our remaining Red Hat servers is very painful by comparison.

    1. Re:Good For Red Hat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Debian servers are a breeze to manage, because everything is consistent and well thought out.

      That Debian is long dead. Debian 8.0 Jessie included systemd. At some point the default desktop was switched from Xfce to GNOME 3, too. Once those things happened Debian essentially became a clone of Fedora. The main difference between the two is that you type "apt" to install packages when using Debian, and "dnf" when using Fedora.

      In my experience, the Debian of today is a pathetic imitation of what Debian used to be, before the systemd and GNOME 3 stupidity. I had used Debian for well over a decade before it was infected with systemd, on many workstations and servers, and the only time I had a problem getting it to boot properly was when a hard drive was dying and corrupted some of the init scripts. Systemd, on the other hand, caused me many problems that weren't due to hardware failures, but rather due to idiotic problems with systemd's philosophy and behavior.

      FreeBSD is the best alternative for getting a traditional Debian-like experience these days. In many ways it's a lot better than Debian ever was. Once you get exposed to FreeBSD's excellent ZFS support it becomes painful to use Linux. FreeBSD's proper init system is also a huge win. Moving the servers and workstations I manage from Linux to FreeBSD took some effort, but in the end it was well worth it.

      And don't even bother mentioning Devuan. In my experience it's an amateurish joke. It's not even worthy of consideration.

  14. For Fun and Profit... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A new book by The MIT Press looks interesting: "For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution".

    1. Re: For Fun and Profit... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mod down. More Creimer affiliate spam.

  15. Re:Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What "peace of mind" do you get? CentOS issues the same security updates that RedHat does, they track upstream closely. You're paying for a bunch of RedHat tools that you aren't using in a single-node instance, and some gui tools that simply aren't all that worthwhile.

    For someone with such a tight budget, I'd suggest you use the free alternatives as much as possible. Paying for RedHat is stupid for a single-node home use. Seriously, I thought you were a miracle worker. Miracle workers don't need to pay for RedHat.

  16. Re:Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What "peace of mind" do you get? CentOS issues the same security updates that RedHat does, they track upstream closely. You're paying for a bunch of RedHat tools that you aren't using in a single-node instance, and some gui tools that simply aren't all that worthwhile.

    For someone with such a tight budget, I'd suggest you use the free alternatives as much as possible. Paying for RedHat is stupid for a single-node home use. Seriously, I thought you were a miracle worker. Miracle workers don't need to pay for RedHat.

    What the fuck are you talking about?

  17. Linux, typical infighting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I read the comments like two families bickering. Can't agree on what is better, Gnome is bad, Unity is bad, no this is better, no that's worse. Maybe it's why so few even bother to work with Linux? I've lost count on many many Linux desktop projects have come and gone, and how many find some little fault with a distro and just develop another one to get their way. Incredibly Red Hat basically ignored all this and is successful because of it.

  18. Re:Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know exactly what I'm talking about, creimer.

    Nobody else is watching 5 replies deep to your idiotic shitposts. It's funny, you've been rebuffed soundly by Slashdot, but you still keep coming back to post as an AC because you're such an addictive personality. No wonder you can't lose weight - it must be hell for you to exercise self discipline and deny yourself all the sugar and fat your body craves.

  19. Too bad it is an 'anomaly' instead of common by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

    "Red Hat remains an anomaly -- it makes money in open source." I still think the biggest flaw in the open source model is that too many people think that all software should be free (as in free beer). Somebody spends massive amounts of time and money to get some software working really well and customers won't pony up an even trivial amount for a license. They would rather dump your elegant solution for a half-baked one that happens to be free instead. When there is almost no money to be made, where does the incentive come from to build something really good, get the bugs worked out, and give it first-class support?

  20. Not quite by emil · · Score: 2

    Oracle will burn you at the stake in license fees if you use any VM other than their Xen port. A DBA's nightmare is some idiot mandating VMWare or HyperV.

    Expensive packages dictate the system. Cores get ripped out, VMs disabled, and the system is otherwise extensively corrupted to obtain the cheapest licensing configuration.

  21. Re: Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He's talking about how RHEL and CentOS are almost 100% functionally identical, especially in a single node configuration.
    And that you're basically paying RH for the privilege of being told to fuck off when you need support.

  22. Who actually wants "exciting"? by whitroth · · Score: 1

    Really? Speaking as a programmer and systems administrator, who actually wants it to be "exciting", and why? Certainly, what you *do* can be exciting, from writing new systems to pr0m, but why would you want the o/s and all the tools to be "exciting"?

    Do you *like* an o/s that crashes, that doesn't do today what it did perfectly well yesterday, due to last night's bugfix/bugmake update? Will it work again tomorrow?

    And for the huge numbers of people who use, or want to use it at work, "exciting" is utterly the LAST thing in the world that you want. Management can be excited over *not* having to pay gigantic licensing fees annually to Redmond or Cupertino - that's where it matters most. And if it works, solidly... are you someone who enjoys debugging your o/s or the standard toolset? Even here on /., that's not the case for 80% at least, I'd guess.

       

    1. Re:Who actually wants "exciting"? by vlueboy · · Score: 1

      Nobody is looking for "exciting" in the breakfix sense, per se. But product teams and devs are looking for cool features for their users. This will help them with checklists full of buzzwords, but it's in detriment of the stability of the product. The rest of this post may or may not reflect what's happening at your company, but it's reflected on a larger scale of failures seen all over the place prioritizing "cool/exciting/BROKEN" over "stable/boring." Then, forcing it on your users by stopping support for old releases or outright ignoring problems if they stay embedded in your latest release. Brings to mind Firefox, GNOME 3, KDE4, systemd, Android (GUI, fragmentation lack of security / patching), Windows 8+ with Metro and telemetry. It even extends to hardware --boring cathode TVs don't sell as profitably as 16:9, then 3D, then smarttv then 4K. Now it's impossible to find the boring tv even if it's all you need, because it's killed the option from the market. On smartphones this happens with features from just 2-3 years ago, such as removable batteries, wired headphones and reasonably-sized 4-inch screens outside of iPhones and ancient imports from 3rd world countries.

      Agile isn't helping --no doubt too many here see too much gets stuck in the backlog for months or years for something that is annoying, dangerous, unexpected... etc. They are working on new shiny features, and thus need new libraries, dependencies, build systems, programming languages and finally releases with shiny stuff (and for web companies, new *BROWSER* versions.) They use Agile to stay busy creating new features to look like they're staying in touch with today's "features" and tracking-platform-do-jour. It's hard to do that and stay "boring" because you're introducing new code --therefore, you're introducing newer bugs. The problem is how far this deprioritizes pressing matters. Eventually you'll find that management and devs will close the boring dev tickets as wont'fix.

      Worse yet, they WON'T close them for years and lean towards announcing workarounds on-demand outside of the official dev ticket. By "announce," this mean as silently as possible, because the devs and managers hate "looking bad" with an all-hands announcement that their product is broken with no fix planned. Initiated users that have learned of the fix the hard way via the original troubleshooting with tech support people are too lazy/shortsighted to share it openly with everyone at their level (especially the poor, clueless weekend staff rotation guys that'll endup paging tech support). Hundreds of man hours repeating this secret fix to every new employee that comes across the bug are wasted, for the users and for tech support. Due to churn, techs will eventually hire a new staff member while the bug goes un-updated. In the grand scheme of things, that new person will also unaware of the secret fix, adding complexity to the situation. No blame for them, but it's annoying that the new staffer eventually finds the bug, but not the "boring" information that a developer was supposed to have kept in the ticket.

  23. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  24. Systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Systemd is what we need. Is growing, in features and stability, release by release. And with a bigger user-base It received feedback, ideas, features and bugfixes. Are you Unix men? ...send patches.

  25. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 0

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  26. Re:I have an announcement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I, for one, am glad I am not a faggot.

    And you kneel for the USA national anthem also, no?

  27. Gnome 3 & systemd: Containers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Containers, unikernals, and micro-services are an attempt to address the large bloat that goes with virtualization.

  28. Re: I have an announcement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everytime the anthem starts I goto the bathroom and drop a huge load of shit out of my ass. Wipe then flush.

  29. Re: Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh so NOW you know what the fuck we're talking about, creimer?

    Your monstrous ego and bizarre personality must be heaving the cold sweats since you lost your precious karma, huh?

    How's it feel to get put in your place, you digital plague?

    Who the fuck is creimer?

  30. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 0

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  31. Re: Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cashew De Reimer is an annoying digital fruit fly buzzing around the trash heap of irrelevant stories and useless comments on Slashdot.

    Shut up, creimer!

  32. rofl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    thank god for red hat being boring...

  33. Red Hat remains an anomaly: No it doesn't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There are lots of companies that are making money off free software (even more so than Red Hat even) even on the consumer end of things. ThinkPenguin's a great example of that. They're fuelling both software (LibreCMC) and hardware development (EOMA68- modular computing) and are the largest retailer of accessories within the Linux ecosystem (they were behind the release of code for the most popular Atheros USB wifi chipsets).

    This companies built its brand and reputation off of selling hardware that works properly with Linux AND can be properly supported by the community into the indefinite future. They do that by building off of components and getting source code released for the chipsets used, designing next-generation hardware, and working with developers and the community. Both funding directly and with partners. Whether we're talking routers, sounds cards, wifi adapters, printers, or computers they've got a solution. The company even has solutions for older technology as well like dial-up modems, firewire cards, and three different parallel port cards/adapters. At the OS driver level and at the OS-loaded firmware level a complete set of code is available for everything in the companies catalog.

    Redhat's not an anomaly and if it's true that Canonical's succeeded financially (which I'm admittedly skeptical of) that's an even larger company making free software development work for them. Aleph Objects, Inc. is another great example.

  34. Re: Red Hat is so boring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You (to recruiter): "Here in the job description, it says you're looking for people with experience with RedHat. I'm quite familiar with CentOS, which is derived from RedHat, and as their FAQ (https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General) explains, 'conforms fully with Red Hat, Inc's redistribution policies and aims to be functionally compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS mainly changes packages to remove trademarked vendor branding and artwork.' Further, since I'm quite familiar with Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and SLES, I'm quite confident I can work productively on RedHat with a very small learning curve."

    As far as "RHEL-specific scenarios that require specific answers," give a concrete example. What sort of thing are they asking you about that you can easily learn on a single home node, but can't possible learn by dicking around with CentOS instead?

    Seriously, any recruiter who doesn't understand that CentOS pulls (usually within 24 hours) from it's upstream RHEL sources, making it more or less functionally identical to RHEL isn't worth working for.

  35. Re: You seem like a flaming faggot. by KGIII · · Score: 1

    Cramming stuff in a man's ass will massage his prostate, which is pleasurable. Females don't actually have a prostate. So, men are more able to enjoy stuff rammed in their ass than females. It's just basic biology.

    I know you're now going to be curious about this. I recommend you try first with a zucchini.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."