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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."
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."
I, for one, am glad I am not a faggot.
First!
Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring, more's the pity.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Redhat agent Lennart Poettering is destroying linux, and millenials are too cucked to do anything to stop him.
They sent me a 90-day notice on when my single user license will expire — and all the different ways I can pay for the renewal.
Open source certainly is a business for Red Hat - they charge a ton of money for it!
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.
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.
Red hat uses the mysterious systemd.
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.
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.
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.
How much do you enjoy getting a dick shoved up your prolapsed rectum?
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.
A new book by The MIT Press looks interesting: "For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution".
fate. Let's not be users. This is QUARRELED ON 3attled in court,
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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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.
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Containers, unikernals, and micro-services are an attempt to address the large bloat that goes with virtualization.
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thank god for red hat being boring...
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.