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

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."

Comments

Re:Anamoly

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:Gnome 3 & systemd

[Junta]

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.