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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."
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.
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.
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.