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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."
Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring, more's the pity.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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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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.
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."